For an alleged ‘religion of peace’ the ideology of Islam certainly seems to throw up quite a few violent individuals or those who support violent Islam based groups. A good example is a man named Muhammed Choudhary of Ilford in East London, who on October 15th was gaoled for seven years for attempting in 2018 to export night vision scopes to a contact in Pakistan. He was supplying these items with the intention that they be shipped onward to the Afghan Taliban, who were at the time fighting against British and American troops, prior to the collapse of the pro-Western Afghan government in August 2021 and the subsequent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. At a previous hearing in London Choudhary pleaded guilty to shipping the scopes to the Taliban and also to making arrangements for the funding of terrorism.
The This Is Local London website said:
Muhammad Choudhary sent night vision and thermal imaging scopes to Pakistan on numerous occasions in 2017 and 2018.
The 41-year-old later admitted they were intended for use by the Taliban which was launching attacks against the then-government and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
He first came to the attention of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) after the rifle scopes were seized at Heathrow Airport in 2018.
If this wasn’t an intelligence led search of Choudhary’s parcel or maybe an HMRC general policy to look more closely at stuff going to Pakistan, then it was an extremely lucky of HMRC to discover this particular parcel. I can well imagine the scene at Heathrow when the nature of this parcel was discovered. Once HMRC realised what the items were, they would have looked on their computer systems to see if a valid Export Licence was in place and once they found that there wasn’t or if the Export Licence wasn’t quite right, they would have called in Counter Terror Police. My suspicion is that there was never any Export Licence in place in the first place because that would have entailed Choudhary submitting some sort of End User Undertaking to back up the licence application and it’s likely that this application for these goods and for this destination would have rung an awful lot of alarm bells with the Export Licence issuing authority. In any case, I take my hat off to HMRC on this occasion for stopping these items that might have ended up being used against British and American forces. If this is a lucky break for HMRC, then it raises the question how much other dodgy stuff is going to equally dodgy Islamist groups overseas which is never declared to the Export Licencing Authorities, nor to HMRC and where HMRC has not been so lucky?
Choudhary had sourced the scopes from legitimate suppliers, who appear to be blameless according to all the versions of this story I’ve seen so far, and may not have even declared to his suppliers that these goods were intended for an area of the world that to put it bluntly is not all that nice. Also according to UK government data, Pakistan is a nation where the UK imposes transit controls on goods passing through Pakistan which means that Choudhary might have been unable to apply for either an export or a transhipment licence due to the nature of the destination.
This Is Local London added:
Acting Commander Gareth Rees, of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “This case is a prime example of how terrorist activity can take many different forms, and shows that we will investigate anyone in the UK who supports terrorist activity, regardless of what it may be in support of or to where it may be linked.
“This was a unique case where government colleagues identified potential terrorist-related activity and shared information with us.
“Further enquiries conducted by Counter Terrorism Command officers led to Choudhary being convicted and jailed for various terrorism offences.”
Mike Pass, assistant director of fraud investigation service at HMRC, said: “The UK operates a strict licensing regime to uphold international sanctions and to ensure military equipment does not fall into the wrong hands.
“We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to ensure effective controls and enforcement on military goods, which contributes to the UK’s national security.”
In my opinion what Choudhary did, which was to supply these potential accessories to weapons, was to act as a sort of fifth columnist. He must have known that the ultimate end user of these goods would be the Taliban and at that time the Taliban were the enemy of not just the Afghan government of the time but also of Britain and the United States. This particular Mohammedan was quite happy that the Taliban would end up with goods that could quite conceivably be used to harm Britons. That would make him not just a fifth columnist but a damned traitor. How many more British Muslims who hold sympathies for some of the worst Islamic regimes in the world are there, because you can be as sure as day follows night that Choudhary is not the only one of his kind?
This time we were lucky, HMRC and the police did what they are supposed to do and they should be congratulated for this. But. I worry just how many times these entities can be lucky and stop items that may well be used against our own troops one day from being sent out by fifth columnists like this?
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