By IRNA
London : Britain was accused Saturday of having one law for Muslims and one law for others following the conviction of a 27 year old primary school caretaker for carrying out a nationwide letter bomb campaign.
Miles Cooper was given an indeterminate sentence after being found guilty of sending seven explosive devices containing nails and broken glass, injuring eight people, and for having what police described as a “bomb factory” in his home.
But Humza Yousaf, convener of Young Asian Scots for Independence, questioned why Cooper was only charged under the Explosive Substances Act and the Offences Against the Person Act and not under the country’s extensive anti-terrorism legislation.
“As a result, his sentence is extremely light in comparison with those charged under terror legislation, even those who did not have an active plot and had not harmed a single person,” Yousaf said in reference to a series of trials against Muslims.
In a letter to the Glasgow Herald Saturday, he said that the conviction and sentence only helps to “confirm what many Muslims have suspected for a long time: there’s one law for us and one law for them.”
“Our authorities are playing with fire if they continue with such blatant double standards in the application of anti-terror laws,” Yousaf added.
He warned that there was “no doubt young Muslims will feel more frustrated if they feel they are being treated differently by the law.”
The latest conviction follows other discriminatory examples, including a former member of the extreme British National Party, who was sentenced in July to two-and-a-half years in jail for amassing an arsenal of explosive chemicals in anticipation of a civil war with immigrants.
The sentence was less than those passed a week earlier against three of five Muslim students, who were commonly labelled as terrorists, for possessing ‘terrorist material’ downloaded from the internet.
The contradictory sentences led the Muslim News last month to challenge the British Government’s definition of terrorism and the judicial response.
“The definition should be universally used against all criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them,” the monthly paper said.
“It should not, as the leader in the French revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, proclaimed in 1794, be misused as a general principal of democracy applied to the “country’s most urgent needs,” it said in its editorial.