Nigel Farage, the current leader of the Brexit Party and former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), slammed a UK Appeal Court ruling granting refugee status to an Egyptian terrorist who has been sentenced to death in Egypt, Farage said in a video on his Twitter account on Tuesday. Yasser El-Sirri, who has been seeking asylum since 1994, was sentenced to death in Egypt in 1993 over an assassination attempt against former premier Atef Sidky, which resulted in the killing of a young girl. The UK Home Office has contested Sirri's requests for asylum and sought to deport him many times, but the Appeal Court ruled in his favor last week. The Home Office said it will be “carefully considering” its next course of action about the court ruling. “Despite the danger that [Sirri] represents, this man will be allowed to stay in the United Kingdom as a refugee,” Farage said in his video. Sirri, who has been a proponent of violent jihad, has claimed asylum more than eight times, costing British taxpayers £2 million (over EGP 43 million), but every time his appeal was rejected. Egypt has called on the UK to extradite Sirri several times. A British government document from the 1990s, which was released in early February this year, says that Egypt asked the UK to extradite Sirri two days before the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, but the UK turned down the request. Sirri was later arrested in October by the British authorities after being involved in the killing of Ahmed Shah Masoud, former leader of the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan on 9 September 2001. Former Tory MP Patrick Mercer has described Sirri as “a dangerous individual.” Besides the assassination plot that Sirri was involved in In the wake of the Luxor massacre of 1997, Egypt issued a list of 14 wanted militants that included Sirri. Sirri was also charged in the US with assisting someone involved in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. In 2003, he defended Taliban propaganda videos of an American vehicle exploding. He also called the death of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden an “honourable” one.
