Hassan Butt

Hassan Butt was born in Luton to Kashmiri parents, who later moved to Manchester. There Butt attended Prestwich High School, where he claims to have been forced out for his 'Islamic activities’. He finished at Abraham Moss High School, then attended Bury College and the University of Wolverhampton, which also expelled him.

Advocating the superiority of Islam, Butt has said that "Islam is a way of life, a way of life superior to communism and capitalism. Christianity is a mere religion and can’t cater for people’s way of life, but Islam can. With the fall of the Soviet Union, people started turning to Islam as a way of life, whereas America wanted to spread capitalism across the world. That's why Islam became the enemy."

Arguing for the necessity for Muslims to live under Sharia law, Butt said that, "Every Muslim must work for the Shari’a to be implemented as a political way of life. They can do that physically, by involving themselves in revolutionary coups, or through political means. As long as they don't attack or compromise other Muslims who are doing something different from them, I have no problem with any of these ways of establishing the Shari’a."

On 9 May 2008, British anti-terror police arrested Butt for questioning just as he was about to board a flight to Lahore, Pakistan. he was released after twelve days. Manchester Police subsequently released extracts from their interviews with Butt in which he stated that "I've never met Osama bin Laden. I've never met anyone from Al-Qaeda, or anyone who claimed to be from Al-Qaeda at all in my entire life", and that he had stabbed himself "as part of the whole scam."

In May 2008, Channel 4 News in the UK reported that Greater Manchester Police had released transcripts from their interviews with Hassan Butt. In the extracts he said he had fabricated many of his previous claims, that he had never met Osama bin Laden and that he had stabbed himself in the arm rather than having been attacked by extremists as he had previously claimed.

In 2007, Butt argued that, "The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief. For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here. But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law."

Butt warned that thousands of young Muslims were preparing to unleash fresh "terror atrocities" on Britain's streets. In May 2007, Butt told the News of the World that, "It's sad but we WILL have more atrocities like 7/7 because there are tens of thousands of Muslims who still support violence." Following the 2007 Glasgow International Airport attack, Butt appeared on Newsnight where he alleged that "most Muslims" believed that terrorist activity attracts divine pleasure and admission to paradise and that "anything that is not an Islamic way of life" is a legitimate target for attack.

At the age of 20 he moved to Pakistan and gained notoriety in 2002 when he claimed that he had recruited 200 British volunteers to fight for the Taliban who would return to the UK and launch terror attacks.

Hassan Butt (Urdu: حسن بٹ ‎) (born 1980) is a British Pakistani former spokesman of the radical Islamic group al-Muhajiroun who now calls on Muslims to "renounce terror".