- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
A Labour MP has said that he would welcome the opportunity to meet the woman who stabbed him in 2010 as part of a “restorative justice process”, The Guardian reported.
East Ham MP Stephen Timms has said that he had received a letter from Roshonara Choudhry apologising for having stabbed him several times at a constituency surgery, the report added.
Currently, Choudhry is serving a life sentence for attempted murder.
After the killing of the Conservative MP Sir David Amess last October, Timms spoke of wishing to meet his attacker face-to-face before she was released from prison.
“I’ve recently had three letters from her which the police have given to me. I wasn’t aware of their existence until the police gave all three of them,” Timms said in an interview to GB News.
“They were written over a period, I think. And in the third of them she says she’s sorry about what happened. So we’re in a restorative justice process at the moment which may lead to me meeting her at some point before she’s released from prison.
“And I’d welcome that if that opportunity does arise. We’ll have to see whether it does or not.”
According to the MP, Choudhry had been “radicalised” and the event “strengthened” his relationship with Muslim constituents, who offered support in the aftermath of the attack.
Timms, who was a Treasury minister under the New Labour government, said he thought Choudhry was coming to shake his hand before the stabbing, and “wasn’t sure she succeeded” until he lifted his shirt in the men’s toilets and saw “quite a lot of blood”.
The injuries were “life-threatening but not imminently life-threatening”, he was told by doctors.
Timms also spoke about the “terrible loss” of his fellow Labour MP Jo Cox, murdered in 2016, and Amess’s killing.
According to Timms, it was important that MPs continued to remain accessible to their constituents in spite of the security risks they face.
“If we were to disappear behind some barriers, I think that would be a real loss to democracy in Britain,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
In a Commons debate last year where MPs paid tribute to Amess after his death, the MP said he would like to meet his attacker face-to-face in order to forgive her.
