Orwell, Eat Your Heart Out: UK Man On Trial For Anti-War Facebook Comment

Azhar Ahmed, 20, admitted what he wrote was ''unacceptable'' in the status update on the social networking site after reading about the deaths of the soldiers in March has told a court.



Ahmed told the court he immediately started to receive critical comments on his page and realised the second half of his post was ''unacceptable''.

But he denied it was ''grossly offensive'', telling a district judge he thought it would have been ''upsetting'' and caused ''distress''.

Ahmed, of Ravensthorpe, Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, told the court he was only trying to make the point that many other deaths in Afghanistan were being ignored.
He said he had no idea it would cause so much upset. Ahmed said: "I didn't intend to insult them at the time.

"When I read back on it, that's when I realised I had actually insulted and upset a lot of people."

He said he replied with apologies to many people who commented on his page and when some told him they had lost relatives in Afghanistan he realised how serious it was.

"That's when I realised it was unacceptable for them to see something so upsetting and distressing, to write something like that," he added.

Earlier Niall Carlin, prosecuting, said the parents of one of the six soldiers who died in the incident saw the posting, which was copied around the internet.

Mr Carlin also read the statement of one woman, who went to the same school as Ahmed, who had lost two friends on duty in Afghanistan and was extremely distressed by what he wrote.