Man charged in connection with preacher's murder in London

Prosecutors have charged a man for the murder of a Syrian-born preacher who was shot dead in London last week.

Abdul-Hadi Arwani - a staunch critic of President Bashar al-Assad's regime - was found in a parked car in Wembley, north London, having died from gunshot wounds.

The Crown Prosecution Service said on Tuesday they had charged 36-year-old Leslie Cooper with the killing. Mr Cooper, of Brent, north west London, was arrested earlier in the week by officers in Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command. The force explained the terror team's involvement on the basis of their experience in managing cases with "international dimensions" and their "established liaison network" overseas.

Mr Arwani, 48, fled Syria as a teenager after surviving the Hama massacre in the early 1980s, and later settled in Britain as a UK national. He was a preacher at the An Noor mosque in Acton, west London, from 2005 to 2011, and is understood to have attended protests against the Assad government at the Syrian embassy in London three years ago.

Detectives have established that Mr Arwani had driven near to the site of the murder two days before he was found dead. They have appealed for information from anyone who may have seen Mr Arwani or his car - a dark coloured Volkswagen Passat - on Sunday April 5 or Tuesday April 7. So far police have said they are "open-minded" about the motive of the killing.

A postmortem examination found the cause of death to be gunshot wounds. An inquest is to be opened and adjourned at Barnet Coroners Court in the coming days.

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