Reform UK leader Nigel Farage told Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday that he was “genuinely worried” about threats said to have been made by an Afghan illegal migrant on social media.
On Tuesday, Mr Farage faced down Fayaz Khan, 26, who is accused of making several threats to harm the Brexit leader on his TikTok account in October of last year as he was preparing to illegally cross the English Channel from France.
After Khan successfully crossed the waterway, he was arrested and charged with making threats to kill and using a public communication network to cause annoyance, anxiety, or inconvenience.
In one of the videos, which apparently came in response to a video made by Mr Farage discussing Khan and illegal immigration, the Afghan national is alleged to have said: “Englishman Nigel, don’t talk s— about me. You not know me. I come to England because I want to marry with your sister.
“You not know me. Don’t talk about me more. Delete the video. I’m coming to England. I’m going to pop, pop, pop.”
Prosecutor Peter Ratliff told the court that Khan made “gun gestures with his hand” while saying “pop, pop, pop” and pointed to his face tattoo of an AK-47 riffle to “emphasise he wasn’t joking”, The Telegraph reported.
Mr Farage, testifying before the court, said of Khan’s video: “He says he’s coming to England and he’s going to shoot me. I understood that very clearly indeed, as did many people who saw it at the same time.
“In high-profile politics, a lot of nasty stuff gets posted. A lot of nasty stuff gets said. What you don’t see is an individual say on social media they are coming for you directly, and secondly, the means by which they are going to do it.”
He added that the videos were “pretty chilling” and that given Khan’s “proximity to guns and love of guns, I was genuinely worried”. Farage said that he found the AK-47 tattoo “particularly aggressive”, adding: “The man was boasting that he was illegally coming to this country. Do people have that tattoo at your local golf club? I highly doubt it.”
For his part, Khan, speaking through an interpreter to the court, claimed that he was merely acting out an online persona and that he was likely high on cannabis during the filming.
“It was never my intention to kill him or anything – this is my character, this is how I act in my videos. In every video I make those sounds, I say ‘pop, pop, pop’. It was just a video, it was never an intention to threaten him,” he said.
“I was high and I think I smoked cannabis and I don’t know what I was saying when I posted that video.”
The trial continues…
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