Fact check: MP’s murderer was Islamic State supporter

The man who was convicted of killing Sir David Amess supported the so-called Islamic State terror group.

Two MPs have been killed in the last decade (Anthony Devlin/PA) (PA Wire)

A widely shared post on social media claimed that two MPs had been “murdered by far-right extremists”.

Evaluation

One of the two murdered MPs, Jo Cox, was murdered by someone who held far-right views. However the killer of the other MP, Sir David Amess, was a supporter of the Islamic State terror group.

The facts

Thomas Mair murdered MP Jo Cox in 2016. In the words of Mr Justice Wilkie, who sentenced Mair to life imprisonment, Ms Cox’s killer had “an admiration for Nazism, and similar anti-democratic white supremacist creeds.”

However the sentencing remarks of Mr Justice Sweeney, who oversaw the trial of Sir David Amess’s killer, concluded that Ali Harbi Ali was “radicalised over the internet” between 2014 and 2016, becoming “aligned to” the Islamic State.

Links

Post on X (archived)

R v Thomas Mair – Sentencing Remarks (archived)

The Queen v Ali Harbi Ali – Sentencing remarks (archived)