A doctor who leads the British wing of a now-banned Islamist terror group has been suspended as a GP, it can be revealed today.
Abdul Wahid was last year exposed by the Mail as having practised as a doctor for more than 20 years under his real name, Dr Wahid Shaida.
As head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK, he was shamed for gloating about the October 7th atrocities carried out by Hamas, who slaughtered more than 1,400 Israelis in a string of surprise attacks.
In the aftermath of the attack, Dr Shaida described the Hamas terrorists as ‘brave mujahideen’ who gave the enemy ‘a very welcome punch on the nose.’
He also told a baying crowd at a pro-Palestine rally outside the Egyptian embassy in London: ‘Victory is coming and everyone has to choose a side. Whose side are you going to be on?’
Dr Wahid Asif Shaida, aka Abdul Wahid, is the head of the UK arm of an Islamic fundamentalist group with followers worldwide. He is pictured here at a rally outside London’s Egyptian embassy in October last year
Dr Shaida has spent more than 20 years practising as a family doctor under his real name, with few realising his support for an extremist Islamist group
Dr Wahid Shaida previously worked as a medic at GP Direct in Harrow but has now been suspended from treating NHS patients and removed from the practice’s website
NHS London, the regional branch of the NHS for the capital, today confirmed he had been suspended from NHS list of approved .
A spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘We take any issues relating to professional conduct seriously and have procedures in place to make sure that individuals are fit to work in the NHS.
‘We can confirm Dr Wahid Shaida has been suspended from the NHS primary care performers list.’
Dr Shaida has worked at the GP Direct practice in the north-west London borough of Harrow since 2002.
He is no longer mentioned on the surgery’s website, however.
Dr Shaida, who lives in a £850,000 semi-detached home a short walk from that same practice, was previously described as having an interest in training future medics.
The website read: ‘His special interests lie in the field of medical education. He is a GP trainer for recently qualified doctors.
Despite being suspended, Dr Shaida, who graduated from medical school in 1991, faces no technical restrictions on working privately.
The UK’s medical regulator the General Medical Council (GMC), which has the power to suspend or strike off doctors in Britain, has him listed on its register as ‘registered with a licence to practise’.
This means he is, to all intents and purposes, a fully-qualified doctor with no issues regarding his work in the GMC’s eyes.
The GMC said: ‘We are only able to confirm the publicly available information about individual doctors as it appears on the medical register.
‘Dr Shaida is registered with a licence to practise.’
This is despite the GMC having received a number of complaints from members of the public about whether Dr Shaida would be able to treat Jewish and gay patients correctly, since his organisation has a record of anti-Semitism and homophobia.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international group dedicated to creating an Islamic ‘caliphate’ governed by Sharia law.
It is banned in several Arab and Asian countries, as well as in Germany.
Britain’s ban finally went through last week, after MPs backed the plans to make it a criminal offence to belong to HT or display support for it in public.
Tony Blair first vowed to ban the group in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005. David Cameron also promised to outlaw the group in 2010, which he described as a ‘conveyor belt to terrorism’.
A fresh review was ordered by ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman last year after the group’s response to the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists.
After Hamas gunmen carried out their murderous attacks, the Facebook page of Wahid’s Hizb ut-Tahrir group hailed the atrocity as having ‘ignited a wave of joy and elation among Muslims globally’.
Hizb ut-Tahrir caused further outrage last year in the weeks that followed during a rally when members chanted ‘jihad’ during a rally outside the Egyptian and Turkish embassies in London and called for ‘Muslim armies’ to attack Israel.
During this rally a senior member of the group asked supporters: ‘What is the solution to liberate people in the concentration camp called Palestine?’
They chanted back: ‘Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!’
Ms Braverman criticised the police for not arresting the men.
But Met chief Sir Mark Rowley insisted no crime had been committed as ‘jihad’ had meanings other than calling for holy war.
Dr Shaida has previously denied his HT group is ‘extremist’, adding the word does not have an agreed meaning and is used as a ‘pejorative term’.
He also said: ‘I attend to my professional duties and commitments diligently, aiming for the best care of my patients at all times. For reasons of professional probity I keep a very clear line between my professional and political life.’
Dr Shaida said his group was calling on the Muslim world to intervene militarily to rescue the people of Gaza ‘who have been subjected to horrific conditions for 16 years’.
He sparked further outrage in December when, during a heated debate with Piers Morgan on his TalkTV show Uncensored, Dr Shaida refused to acknowledge that Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered civilians – and labelled them a ‘resistance organisation’.
‘(What happened on October 7) is a resistance,’ he said.
‘Resistance is a right in Islam, it’s a right in international law, a right that Churchill said in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, he wrote in that book it is a primary right of men to kill and die for the land they live in.’
He then tried to describe the slaughter of civilians on October 7 as ‘appalling’, ‘if’ it had happened, before acknowledging that they had been killed by people he described as ‘resisting occupation.’
He added: ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,’ but this prompted Morgan’s curt reply ‘Bull****’.
