A court in England on Friday sentenced the man who drove a van into a crowd of Muslims near a north London mosque in June 2017 to 43 years in prison, BBC reported.
Darren Osborne, 48, (pictured above) was found guilty of murdering Makram Ali, 51, and injuring eight people. “This was a terrorist attack,” Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said. “You intended to kill.”
A week before the attack, Osborne became radicalised after reading “those determined to spread hatred of Muslims on the basis of their religion”, the judge pointed out. “Your use of Twitter exposed you to racists and anti-Islamic ideology. In short, you allowed your mind to be poisoned by those who claimed to be leaders.”
After the attack, an eyewitness had said that Osborne showed no regret or no emotion. “He was just there smiling and blowing kisses. He said, ‘I have done what I am supposed to do’.”
Later, speaking to reporters outside the court, Ali’s daughter Ruzina Akhtar said her father would “always stay in our hearts, his laughter will echo the walls of our home, his smile will be reflected in our eyes, his memories will be alive in our conversations”, The Guardian reported. “Our father, like the victims of most terrorism, was entirely innocent which makes his death in this violent way all the more hurtful.”
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