A British pharmacist has been convicted for showing a graphic ISIL beheading video during attempts to radicalise two young children.
Zameer Ghumra set up Twitter accounts for the two children, both aged under 10, so they could follow other ISIL supporters, a court was told. He asked one if they wanted to travel with him to Syria, or remain in Britain to work as a terrorist recruiter.
Ghumra told the children that they could not have any non-Muslim friends. He taught them how to survive a bomb attack and how to fight with knives, rewarding with them with sweets to retain their loyalty, the court in Nottingham was told.
The ISIL training videos included images of how to behead someone and featured a man saying they would continue to behead American soldiers if more were sent to the region.
Prosecutors said his behaviour was part of a pattern of extremism that included links to British hate preacher Anjem Choudary and publicly defending ISIL fighters. Ghumra told one customer at his pharmacy that members of ISIL were “not bad people, they’re only defending themselves”.
A jury convicted him Ghumra, of Leicester, on Thursday of disseminating “terrorist propaganda”. He will be sentenced on Friday.
“Zameer Ghumra tried to brainwash impressionable children with this violent ideology by making one watch beheading videos and urging them both to adopt a hard-line religious outlook,” said Sue Hemming, a senior counter-terrorism prosecutor after the verdict.
