Ed Butler, leading Oliver Kavanagh and instructed by Amer Asghar of Martin Murray & Associates represented DT, a young devout Muslim woman with no previous convictions, who was acquitted of four of the five terrorism charges she faced after a two-month trial in front of the Recorder of London at the Central Criminal Court. The jury found the defendant not guilty of three counts of distributing terrorist publications, failed to reach a verdict on another distribution count, on which the prosecution then offered no evidence, and convicted her of the less serious offence of possessing a terrorist document, for which she received a community order.
The case was widely reported in the media as involving a ‘Jihad teacher’ because the prosecution had claimed in opening that the defendant shared her terrorist beliefs with young children who she taught in a Muslim school by using a terrorist publication as a textbook! Mr Butler challenged whether the book was a ‘terrorist publication’ at all, highlighting the lack of expert opinion and demonstrating in cross-examination that the police had failed to find any witness from the community to support their argument that the book or the defendant’s teaching involved encouraging terrorism. Another two counts related to the defendant sharing a publication about ‘Wala and Bara’ with a friend. Mr Butler again demonstrated in cross-examination that the police had failed to investigate this thoroughly and capitalised on their error by calling this friend, who had not been contacted by police at any point, as a defence witness.
Other evidence in the case came mainly from the defendant’s telephone and included ISIS propaganda videos, text conversations with friends and e-books about Islamic war and Jihad. This evidence was said by the prosecution to evidence a ‘terrorist mindset’. However, by using expert evidence on the workings of the phone application ‘Telegram’, the defence were able to achieve a significant concession that much of this material could have been automatically downloaded without the defendant’s knowledge. The defendant herself then gave evidence to explain the messages and explain her possession of the videos she accepted knowledge of, with reference to her academic and journalistic interest in international conflict, particularly the historic conflict in her family’s homeland of Chechnya.
The video the defendant was convicted of possessing was an ISIS propaganda video from Telegram that she had accepted watching part of. The only question for the jury was whether she had watched enough of the video to know it contained terrorist material. In sentencing for that offence, the Judge accepted that a prison sentence was not required and passed a community order for 2 years.
Sentencing remarks are available here ➡ https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/rex-v-dzhamilya-timaeva/
BBC News Article ➡ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c207kl418p4o
Ed Butler Profile ➡ https://15nbs.com/portfolio/ed-butler/
Oliver Kavanagh Profile ➡ https://15nbs.com/portfolio/oliver-kavanagh/
To instruct Ed or Oliver, please get in touch with Glenn.Matthews@15NBS.com or David.Cox@15NBS.Com
