British peer denies offering £10 million bounty for capture of Obama, Bush

A controversial British parliamentarian of Kashmiri origin, Lord Nazir Ahmed was suspended this week after reports claimed he offered a £10 million bounty for the capture of Barack Obama, comments which he later denied on Monday.

Ahmed, the first Muslim peer from Britain’s Labour party, had reportedly made the comments in Haripur on Friday to express his solidarity with chief of Laskhar e Tayyiba, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, upon whom the United States placed a $10 million bounty last month.

Ahmed reportedly said Obama had “challenged the dignity of the Muslim Ummah (community).”

“If the U.S. can announce a reward of $10 million for the captor of Hafiz Saeed, I can announce a bounty of £10 million on President Obama and his predecessor George Bush,” he said, adding that he was prepared to do whatever was necessary to gather this sum, including selling his assets.

A Labour spokesman said: “We have suspended Lord Ahmed pending investigation. If these comments are accurate we utterly condemn these remarks which are totally unacceptable.”

“The international community is rightly doing all in its power to seek justice for the victims of the Mumbai bombings and halt terrorism,” the spokesman added.

Ahmed denies offering bounty

However, Ahmed, speaking from Pakistan on Monday, said he had only told the meeting that Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes.

“I never said those words,” the Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying.

“I did not offer a bounty. I said that there have been war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan and those people who have got strong allegations against them – Bush and Blair have been involved in illegal wars and should be brought to justice. I do not think there’s anything wrong with that,” he said, adding that he was equally concerned that anyone suspected of terrorism should face justice as well.

He challenged the party to produce evidence against him, the Post reported.

“They have suspended me? That’s a surprise to me. I did not know,” he told the Press Association on Monday. “If the Labour party want to suspend me I will deal with the party.”

Lord Ahmed is no stranger to controversy in Britain. He hosted a book launch at the House of Lords in 2005 of a controversial Swedish writer Israel Shamir who is known for his anti-Israeli and Jewish views.

Ahmed was also a vocal opponent of the British government’s decision to honor writer Salman Rushdie with a knighthood in 2007.

(Additional writing by Eman El-shenawi)