Two arsonists set a car on fire outside the Birmingham home of prominent leftwing Muslim activist Salma Yaqoob last week.
CCTV footage captured at 1:36am on Wednesday shows one person pouring what appears to be petrol on the vehicle in the driveway of the house and then setting the fire while another looks on.
Yaqoob’s brothers, Farrukh and Rashad, rushed outside after seeing light from the flames and used hosepipes and buckets to try to stop the fire from spreading to the fuel tank. No one was injured.
“It could have been much worse,” one of the brothers told BirminghamLive.
“It has been an extremely distressing experience,” Yaqoob told the outlet. “We are grateful that no one has been hurt. The fire service responded quickly to prevent the flames spreading to the house where family members had been sleeping. There is a police investigation and we hope the perpetrators will be identified quickly.”
Green party deputy leader Mothin Ali posted a video message after the attack saying the car belonged to a male party member who was a “really valued activist”.
“As Muslims who engage in politics, we face a disproportionate amount of criticism from the mainstream media,” he said, “and we even get those from within our own communities and within our own movements making us feel like we don’t belong.”
He added: “This attack didn’t occur in a vacuum, we’ve got an increasingly divided society… People are feeling left behind by the political establishment and they’re angry, and the tension and hostility this creates puts people’s lives at risk.”
Yaqoob co-founded the Respect party with George Monbiot in 2005 and was involved in the formation of Your Party. She also founded the Birmingham branch of the Stop the War Coalition and in 2021 unsuccessfully stood as a mayoral candidate for the Labour party.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said on X: “I am horrified that a car has been deliberately set alight outside the home of the family of Salma Yaqoob, a wonderful prominent anti-racist and peace campaigner in Birmingham. I hope the police take this shocking incident seriously.”
Joshua Carroll is a writer and journalist.
Read the full article at Novara Media →
United Kingdom