From the Sheffield Star:
A WELL-KNOWN councillor and former leader in Sheffield’s war on crime has been arrested on suspicion of possessing drugs.
Sheffield councillor Mazher Iqbal, a prominent member of the city council’s Labour shadow cabinet, was one of two men arrested in the Handsworth area on suspicion of possessing a controlled drug.
He has been released on police bail while officers carry out further investigations.
You can read the full story here.
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7 Comments
Why do you always put so much effort into pointing out other peoples’ misfortune? Highlighting this article makes LDV seem rather petty and hypocritical, as so many Liberal Democrats believe in decriminalising drugs.
I tend to agree with Paul. I don’t think LDV should be covering matters such as this, especially when the person involved is a councillor. Mind you, Iain Dale has a story about a Cambridge Lib Dem councillor on his blog.
I was going to write in asking what is the point of this story on LDV, but I see others have beat me to it.
I strongly disagree with the above comments!
With the decline (or sometimes even collusion) of local newspapers, we often would not be informed about the alleged or even the proven crimes of our local Councillors. If we don’t expose our opponents’ wrongdoing, who else will? A Councillor in was elected in my area after he had assaulted two female council wardens, because hardly anyone knew of his conviction, and our local party thought it ‘unsporting’ to refer to it at election time! keep up the good work, Mark. And if the others expose our (genuine) wrongdoing, so be it.
I should perhaps add that the Cambridge story was not about drugs, but about a row with police on a train:
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/cn_news_home/displayarticle.asp?id=468531
Somebody certainly needs to aggregate these things. The story sounds pretty thin though – what “controlled drug”? Were they handling a vanload of refined opiates, or just found in the same room as a cannabis plant? It’s easy to drum up an arrest-on-suspicion these days, but they don’t appear to have been charged with any crimes, so there probably isn’t any real evidence yet.
I dislike having to point this out, but the guy has a foreign sounding name, and hence has a significantly higher-than-average chance of being arrested for something he didn’t do. Sad but true; our police aren’t very good at this stuff (I very much want them to improve).
Andrew: you’re right to highlight the difference between arrest and guilt, and on LDV we both try to make that clear in the stories and also report subsequent conviction or acquittal if we’ve reported an arrest previously. Of course an update occasionally slips by without being noticed, so always happy for people to point out when that’s happened.