UK police using Hajj as an opportunity to stop Muslims for data collection: report

LONDON: The UK police are using the Hajj season opportunity to stop people in order to gather their personal data, ARY News reported on Monday.

This was revealed by a Human Rights Organisation in a report released under the head of “Harassment at Borders, The Impact on the muslim community.”

According to the report Muslims are being detained at ports and airports for up to six hours by law enforcement using controversial counter-terrorism powers so disproportionately that the practice has become Islamophobic.

Speaking to ARY News at the report launch event, Research Director of the Organisation Dr Asim Qureshi said that the report looks at how predominantly muslims but also people of colour are stopped at Uk ports, so whether it’s an airport or sea port, they are stopped by the border agency and they are profiled without any suspicion and they are asked lots of very intrusive questions about their beliefs, political ideas by the police.

“We know for example that ethnic minorities as a proportion of wider British Society are much more likely to get stopped than anybody else but what we don’t know really right now is the data around religion itself, because we know that they record the data but they (government) are refusing to hand that data over and we believe that when we actually get that data we’ll see that muslims are disproportionally targeted.