Imam Mohammed Mahmoud.
Mohammed Mahmoud says allowing an unarmed man to be be harmed is against Islam and said he simply allowed “sense to prevail”.
A north London imam who protected a terror suspect after a van was driven into a crowd of people outside a mosque has insisted he is not a hero for rushing to the man’s aid.
Mohammed Mahmoud, 30, has been credited with saving the man’s life after he apparently used his own body to shield him from attacks by an angry crowd near Finsbury Park Mosque.
He said his actions were the “right thing to do” and said allowing the crowd, which had just left Ramadan night prayers in the early hours of Monday morning, to injure the man would have been against Islam.
Mr Mahmoud, who was born in Egypt but moved to north London as a baby, told Sky News: “I always naturally just break up fights anyway. If I see a fight I’ll break one up.
“And he posed no harm to anybody because he’d been restrained. And now he’s restrained let the police take him into custody and we hand him over which is our duty as members of the British public, to follow the law, to hand him over unharmed, and to not contradict our own religion which prohibits harming any unarmed man.
“The people here allowed sense to prevail and didn’t allow any mob rule to dictate the outcome of the situation.
Darren Osborne.
“The true heroes are those who arrived on the scene right at the start and the heroes are those in the hospital right now suffering with injuries, some of them life-threatening.
“The Great British public always knows that when a tragedy occurs they don’t ask the denomination, the ethnicity of a victim, they know that he’s a human or she’s a human, and they put humanity before everything.”
One person died and nine others injured after the attacker, identified as 47-year-old Darren Osborne, allegedly deliberately drove a white van into a crowd of worshippers near the mosque on Seven Sisters Road.
Osborne has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and terror offences. The incident is being treated as a suspected terror attack. (SKYNEWS)