BICOM

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn admitted yesterday that he was involved in a wreath-laying ceremony in Tunis in 2014 but insisted it was to commemorate a 1985 Israeli air raid.

Corbyn previously told reporters that he was present but not involved in the wreath-laying ceremony next to the graves of PLO men who organised the Black September terrorist attack on Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972. Chris Williamson MP was last night unable to confirm or deny whether Corbyn had laid a wreath at the graves when asked on BBC2’s Newsnight programme.

Yesterday, when questioned by a reporter about the pictures, the Labour Party leader said: “I laid one along with many other people in memory of all who died in the awful attack in 1985, which I keep repeating… was condemned by the whole world.”

Corbyn faces further criticism after it emerged yesterday that Hamas’s leaders also attended what he described as a “peace conference” in Tunisia in 2014 where he went before the wreath-laying ceremony. According to reports, the conference included Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar, who is accused of saying that killing Jewish children is “legitimate,” Mousa Marzook, Hamas’s then second-in-command who is designated as a terrorist by the US and was found guilty of financing terror by an American court and Hamas member Oussama Hamdan, who recently said that the antisemitic myth that Jews drank Christian blood was “not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact”.

The Daily Telegraph has published a photograph of Corbyn giving a four-fingered Rabaa sign, a symbol of allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood and a symbol of solidarity with the victims of the 2013 Rabaa massacre in Cairo, which followed the overthrow of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in a military coup d’etat.

A spokesman for the Labour leader said he had been “standing up for democracy” when he used the Rabaa symbol, with the photo reported to have been taken during a visit to Finsbury Park mosque in 2016.

In 2015, a review of the Muslim Brotherhood found that parts of the group had a “highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism”. Then Prime Minister David Cameron said aspects of the group’s ideology “run counter to British values of democracy”.