British Muslim whose ‘pivotal’ speech stopped race riots still mourning son’s death

Tariq Jahan, father of Haroon Jahan, speaking near the crime scene where Haroon and two other Asian men were hit by a car and killed in August 2011. (AFP/File)
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Updated 08 August 2021
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British Muslim whose ‘pivotal’ speech stopped race riots still mourning son’s death

  • Tariq Jahan credits his faith for helping him address Birmingham crowd in 2011
  • His son Haroon was hit by car while protecting businesses from looters hours earlier

LONDON: A British Muslim father whose speech urging calm proved “pivotal” in defusing deadly riots in the UK in 2011 has said that his faith helped him remain calm, but that he still grieves a decade after his son was killed in the violence.

Tariq Jahan’s 21-year-old son Haroon was hit by a car alongside brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31, as they tried to protect local businesses in the city of Birmingham from being attacked by looters, in scenes that authorities feared would escalate into race riots.

Jahan addressed a large crowd just hours after Haroon’s death to “plead” with people to end the violence, in an act that Derrick Campbell, a former advisor to then prime minister David Cameron, said played a key part in preventing the riots escalating along racial lines.

“Today we stand here to plead with all the youth to remain calm for our communities to stand united,” Jahan said at the time. “I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, whites, we all live in the same community. Why do we have to kill one another? What started these riots and what has escalated? Why are we doing this?

“I lost my son. Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home. Please.”

A decade on, Jahan told The Telegraph newspaper: “I had no idea the impact it would have. Obviously I was emotional because of the loss of my son. Everything came out from the heart.

“I think people were in shock. They were like ‘hold on, this guy has just lost his son and all he can say is calm down — and what possible reason can we have for carrying on?’ It made a huge impact, it stopped people in their tracks.”

Jahan added that his Muslim faith helped him deal with the dreadful situation in a measured way.

“It was the month of Ramadan at the time. We were fasting and it’s a time to look into yourself and reflect,” he said. “This is something that I am proud of. I can look back on my life and say I did something positive, I did something good.

“Hate won’t get you anywhere, but the biggest thing, showing love to everyone in this world, it really does, it unites everyone and I think that’s what happened here.”

Campbell, a former government advisor on violent crime who was with Jahan as he addressed the crowd in 2011, said that the riots had become “so worrying” that he traveled to the area himself in an effort to coordinate with authorities to quell the violence.

“That (Jahan’s) speech will go down in history, in my view, as one of the most effective and timely speeches I have ever witnessed,” Campbell said.

“We started to see and get intelligence that there were fracture lines developing. This was quickly moving into what could have been an all-out race riot.

“Cameron had some decisions to make about the deployment of police, maybe troops, and I was expected to go and address the nation. As we were driving from police headquarters to Dudley Road, the site of the incident, we had a discussion and it dawned on us: Would Tariq be prepared to talk to the media and to the country? So we called him while we were driving to the scene and he said yes, and we were very grateful for that.”

However, Jahan added that despite the significance of his actions preventing further loss, he has not yet recovered from the death of his son.

“Time doesn’t heal. How can you forget that your son was killed? You witnessed everything, you tried to save him and you watched the life ebb out of your son’s body,” he said. “I won’t forget. I can’t forget.”


Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

Updated 9 sec ago
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Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

JAKARTA: Indonesia’s Supreme Court jailed a former government official accused of human trafficking for four years, reversing a lower court decision to acquit him after people were found in cages in his palm oil plantation.
Condemned internationally and at home, the senior official in the provincial government in North Sumatra, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, had been accused of human trafficking, torture, forced labor, and slavery.
Prosecutors launched an appeal after a lower court acquitted him of the charges in July.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court said he would serve four years in jail, without specifying reasons, in a ruling dated Nov. 15 and seen on the court’s website on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters has sought comment from Terbit’s lawyer.
The macabre case came to light in 2022, when a police corruption investigation into Terbit found people detained in cages on his property, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010, court documents showed.
Terbit, who was jailed for nine years for corruption in 2022, had previously claimed the detained individuals were participating in a drug rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors said they had been tortured and forced to work on his plantation. Six had died in captivity, Indonesia’s rights body found.

Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

Updated 24 min 7 sec ago
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Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani protesters demanding the release of ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday killed four members of the nation’s security forces, the government said, as the crowds defied police and closed in on the capital’s center.
More than ten thousand protesters armed with sticks and slingshots took on police in central Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon, AFP journalists saw, less than three kilometers (two miles) from the government enclave they aim to occupy.
Khan was barred from standing in February elections that were marred by allegations of rigging, sidelined by dozens of legal cases that he claims were confected to prevent his comeback.
But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has defied a government crackdown with regular rallies. Tuesday’s is the largest in the capital since Khan was jailed in August 2023.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said “miscreants” involved in the march had killed four members of the paramilitary Rangers force on a city highway leading toward the government sector.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the men had been “run over by a vehicle.”
“These disruptive elements do not seek revolution but bloodshed,” he said in a statement. “This is not a peaceful protest, it is extremism.”
The government said Monday that one police officer had also been killed and nine more were critically wounded by demonstrators who set out toward Islamabad on Sunday.


The capital has been locked down since late Saturday, with mobile Internet sporadically cut and more than 20,000 police flooding the streets, many armed with riot shields and batons.
The government has accused protesters of attempting to derail a state visit by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who arrived for a three-day visit on Monday.
Last week, the Islamabad city administration announced a two-month ban on public gatherings.
But PTI convoys traveled from their power base in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the most populous province of Punjab, hauling aside roadblocks of stacked shipping containers.
“We are deeply frustrated with the government, they do not know how to function,” 56-year-old protester Kalat Khan told AFP on Monday. “The treatment we are receiving is unjust and cruel.”
The government cited “security concerns” for the mobile Internet outages, while Islamabad’s schools and universities were also ordered shut on Monday and Tuesday.
“Those who will come here will be arrested,” Interior Minister Naqvi told reporters late Monday at D-Chowk, the public square outside Islamabad’s government buildings that PTI aims to occupy.
PTI’s chief demand is the release of Khan, the 72-year-old charismatic former cricket star who served as premier from 2018 to 2022 and is the lodestar of their party.
They are also protesting alleged tampering in the February polls and a recent government-backed constitutional amendment giving it more power over the courts, where Khan is tangled in dozens of cases.


Sharif’s government has come under increasing criticism for deploying heavy-handed measures to quash PTI’s protests.
“It speaks of a siege mentality on the part of the government and establishment — a state in which they see themselves in constant danger and fearful all the time of being overwhelmed by opponents,” read one opinion piece in the English-language Dawn newspaper published Monday.
“This urges them to take strong-arm measures, not occasionally but incessantly.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said “blocking access to the capital, with motorway and highway closures across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has effectively penalized ordinary citizens.”
The US State Department appealed for protesters to refrain from violence, while also urging authorities to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to ensure respect for Pakistan’s laws and constitution as they work to maintain law and order.”
Khan was ousted by a no-confidence vote after falling out with the kingmaking military establishment, which analysts say engineers the rise and fall of Pakistan’s politicians.
But as opposition leader, he led an unprecedented campaign of defiance, with PTI street protests boiling over into unrest that the government cited as the reason for its crackdown.
PTI won more seats than any other party in this year’s election but a coalition of parties considered more pliable to military influence shut them out of power.


Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

Updated 26 November 2024
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Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

MOSCOW: Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons, though there were fears such a step would have serious implications.
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the consequences of the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012, said on Telegram.
Medvedev said that even the threat of such a transfer of nuclear weapons could be considered as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia.
“The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to the fait accompli of an attack on our country,” under Russia’s newly updated nuclear doctrine, he said.


China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

Updated 26 November 2024
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China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

  • The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait

BEIJING: China’s military said on Tuesday it deployed naval and air forces to monitor and warn a US Navy patrol aircraft that flew through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, denouncing the United States for trying to “mislead” the international community.
Around once a month, US military ships or aircraft pass through or above the waterway that separates democratically governed Taiwan from China — missions that always anger Beijing.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and says it has jurisdiction over the strait. Taiwan and the United States dispute that, saying the strait is an international waterway.
The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait “in international airspace,” adding that the flight demonstrated the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said in a statement.
China’s military criticized the flight as “public hype,” adding that it monitored the US aircraft throughout its transit and “effectively” responded to the situation.
“The relevant remarks by the US distort legal principles, confuse public opinion and mislead international perceptions,” the military’s Eastern Theatre Command said in a statement.
“We urge the US side to stop distorting and hyping up and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.”
In April, China’s military said it sent fighter jets to monitor and warn a US Navy Poseidon in the Taiwan Strait, a mission that took place just hours after a call between the Chinese and US defense chiefs. (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Additional reporting and writing by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)


Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

Updated 26 November 2024
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Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

KYIV: Russia staged a record number of drone attacks overnight over Ukraine, damaging buildings and “critical infrastructure” in several regions, the air force said Tuesday.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of Shahed strike unmanned aerial vehicles and unidentified drones,” the air force said, referring to Iranian-designed drones and putting the figure at 188.