A man has been arrested by counter-terrorism officers over a bomb threat sent to a mosque in Rotherham.
The 43-year-old man, from Plymouth, was held at 8am on Friday by officers from the north-east counter-terrorism unit.
This month a letter was posted to the Jamia Masjid Abu Bakr mosque in the South Yorkshire town, saying: “Next time it will be a bomb, you Muslim scum.” The letter was signed with the number 1488, believed to be used by neo-Nazi groups.
Ch Supt Rob Odell, of South Yorkshire police, said the town’s mosques had been offered security advice.
Sabir Hussain, secretary of the mosque, described the bomb threat as “appalling and very frightening”. He told the BBC the Muslim community had felt “under siege” since the publication of the Jay report on the sexual exploitation of teenage girls by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.
He said community cohesion was “very low” in the town following far-right marches. “There is never a day goes by when we don’t get abuse. At first we thought the letter might be a prank with somebody messing about, but when we looked at the code and checked it on the internet then that made us think this is very, very serious and not just an ordinary prank.”
