Ajmal Shahpal, 41, from Nottingham, denies encouraging others to commit acts of terror
A man who retweeted praise of a terrorist on Twitter told a jury he only did it "to have more followers".Prosecutors say he encouraged others to carry out terror attacks and posted an image of a victim's severed head on his social media account.He denies two counts of encouraging others to commit, prepare, or instigate acts of terrorism and two alternative charges of the same offence being reckless as to whether such acts would be encouraged.
Assisted by an Urdu interpreter, he denied pretending to have a poor understanding of English to try to escape responsibility for his tweets. After the defendant accepted that Mr Paty did not deserve to die and that the teacher's killer was not "as brave as a lion" - contradicting statements in one of his retweets - Mr Pawson-Round said: "Why did you retweet a tweet saying all these things then?"In response, Mr Shahpal said: "As I have already told you, the reason behind this was just to have some more followers.
"A friend of mine who set up this account for me, he told me that if you do this, you are going to get more followers."
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