- Thursday, April 18, 2024
By: Sattwik Biswal
AFTER receiving death threats, a Labour MP along with her children were forced to flee her home in the middle of the night.
A 30-year-old woman, Sundas Alam has admitted threatening the Bradford West MP Naz Shah via email.
Shah said she had previously received many death threats, but this is the first occasion when she had dialled 999.
“I really genuinely felt it was an immediate firearms threat,” she was quaoted as saying.
Alam, of Princeville Street, Bradford, had previously denied three charges of sending threatening communications to the MP and a charge of perverting the course of justice.
However, on Thursday, she changed her pleas to guilty at York Crown Court.
As reported by the Telegraph and Argus, the court heard that Shah was so upset after receiving five emails on 3 April that she called 999.
It added that the contents of the emails included “you are going to die this week coming” and “you won’t see your children”, also sexual threats and insults.
Reports suggest that Alam had deliberately used spoof email addresses to make it appear that they were sent by someone else. In the early hours of 4 April, three people were arrested, Alam’s former line manager, his wife and brother.
But they were later released after it became clear who was behind the threat emails.
Shah said Alam’s actions had led to an entirely innocent family being dragged out of their beds by armed police and questioned for 20 hours.
“I can’t imagine what they went through,” she said.
My statement following today’s guilty plea for death threats to me and my children. https://t.co/8xl6Zv0FDT pic.twitter.com/fuHGxQhEBz
— Naz Shah MP 💙 (@NazShahBfd) October 28, 2021
Praising the actions of West Yorkshire Police, Shah said it was the first time she had dialled 999, having “genuinely felt it was an immediate firearms threat”.
“It was the length of time between one email and the other,” she said.
“I was thinking, ‘this is somebody stewing, this is somebody stewing for so many hours and actually saying, ‘how do you want this rifle to your head or through the window’.”
Shah added: “At the time it was really, really real.”
After making the call, she said that she remained at home to wait for the police, but her priority was to make sure her children were taken to a safe place.
She said: “You should never get used to people threatening your family. It shouldn’t be a pre-requisite for doing the job.”
Alam has been remanded to custody and is due to be sentenced on 29 November.
