One of the trustees of Manchester’s Islamic Cultural Centre is facing questions about his links to Tehran after he praised terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani at a regime event in Iran where the audience chanted “death to England” and “death to Israel”.
The preacher, Farrokh Sekaleshfar — who called for homosexuals to be put to death while preaching in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, shortly before a terrorist murdered 49 people at a nearby gay nightclub — is a trustee of a Manchester charity, based on an industrial estate in Carrington, south west of the city centre.
Now the JC can reveal that in 2020, the Manchester-born Shia cleric was a keynote speaker at a memorial organised by the Iranian regime in Qom, Iran’s holiest city, for terror chief Qasem Soleimani after he was killed in a US drone strike. Soleimani was the so-called “shadow commander” of the brutal Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Sekaleshfar is also listed as a speaker at the Islamic Centre of England (ICE), which has been named as the “London office” of the IRGC and is under investigation by the Charity Commission.
The revelations come after Manchester Labour MP Jeff Smith called on the government to launch an investigation into links between the Iranian regime and Islamic cultural centres in the city and across the UK.
Speaking in the House of Commons, he said there were “wider concerns about other cultural centres across the UK, including in Manchester, allegedly having links to the regime and allegedly controlled by [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei.”
He added: “Would the government consider a wider investigation of those outposts — those cultural centres — so that we can get to the bottom of this and get to the truth?”
Source: IMFAT