A south London chaplain has been caught visiting the Taliban while on a trip to Afghanistan, GB News has revealed.
Suliman Gani, an NHS chaplain from St George’s Hospital in Tooting, travelled to Afghanistan and apparently met up with leaders from the brutal regime. It is unknown whether he was aware of who he was meeting.
He and other British clerics posed alongside Taliban foreign minister, Mullah Amir Khan Mattaqi – a man who once threatened that there would be “serious consequences” if the West killed Osama bin Laden.
According to MailOnline, a hospital source said NHS leaders were not aware of Mr Gani’s trip.
It has been suggested that the chaplain, in a private capacity, was on a humanitarian mission to provide Afghanistan with “essential aid”.
Despite the supposed positive purpose of the mission, Mr Gani was pictured in several official images with the Taliban top brass.
Professor Anthony Glees, a security expert at the University of Buckingham, branded the chaplain a “useful idiot”.
He told MailOnline: “This is all part of the Taliban’s ‘out-reach’ programme.
“It might be that [Mr Gani] is misguided, and his aid mission is being exploited by the Taliban. If that is the case, then he is a useful idiot for this regime. As for the hospital, they should consider if this chaplain needs some guidance.”
An Afghan TV network claimed the party of clerics met the “minister of vice and virtue”.
A spokesman said that the clerics “wanted to see the Taliban government with their own eyes” and discovered the Western media depiction of life in Afghanistan to be “different to the reality”.
It was also said that the group met the justice minister. In a statement, he “expressed British Muslims are very happy with the rule of Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan and pray for its survival”.
It’s unclear whether Mr Gani was aware of the identities of the people he was meeting. It is also unclear if he attended all of the meetings.
In 2016, Mr Gani received an apology from former defence secretary Michael Fallon who made the “entirely untrue” claim that the British muslim supported Islamic State.
