A former Hamas bodyguard has been found guilty of a knife attack on a bailiff outside his home in Birmingham, the BBC reported. Mohammed Alfatih, also known as Mohammed Naim, is wanted in Germany over an alleged plot to murder Jewish people. He had been photographed working for a former Hamas leader before he was granted asylum in the United Kingdom in 2015 and British citizenship in 2020. He is the son of a senior Hamas official.

The 40-year-old was found guilty by a majority verdict at Birmingham Crown Court of unlawful wounding, possession of two knives, and criminal damage. He was cleared of wounding with intent. Jurors deliberated for more than six hours over three days. Sentencing will come later. He is expected to be extradited to Germany after serving his UK sentence; the German request states his connection to Hamas.

The attack was in Kings Heath on 14 October last year. Alfatih was already under counter-terrorism surveillance. The jury was shown footage of him brandishing two large kitchen knives and lashing out at the broken window of a van. Bailiff Kevin Bucknall was left with cuts to the head and needed hospital treatment. Alfatih had pleaded not guilty on the grounds of self-defence. He told the court he chased the bailiff to scare him away after his wife was asked to settle debts and her car was clamped, and that a struggle had taken place inside the terraced house. He said the incident came a day after he learned one of his brothers had been killed in Gaza, and that he had been "terrified" and not in his "full mind." Defence barrister Kate O'Raghallaigh said he had a heightened sense of danger from past trauma, including, in his evidence, torture in Egypt in 2010 and being shot on two occasions.

Jurors were not told of his Hamas links or his work as a bodyguard to the late Ismail Haniyeh. While he was detained for the Birmingham attack, he was re-arrested after German authorities said he had been part of an alleged plot to attack Israeli targets in Central Europe. He failed in a bid to have the wounding charges thrown out over media coverage; Judge George Lubega ruled the reports did not pose a high risk of prejudice. A Home Office spokesperson said there can be "no place in our society for those who engage in violence or seek to facilitate terrorist attacks against innocent people" and that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation. The UK verdict is about the bailiff attack. The German allegations remain a separate case.