Ex-bodyguard to Hamas chief, wanted in Germany over Oct. 7 plot, convicted for UK knife attack

A UK court convicted a former bodyguard to slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Friday of attacking a bailiff outside the defendant’s Birmingham home in October 2025.

After serving his sentence, defendant Mohammed Alfatih, 40, the son of a senior Hamas official, is expected to be extradited to Germany to stand trial for orchestrating an alleged terror plot against Jewish and Israeli targets in Germany and Austria ahead of the second anniversary of the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023.

German authorities issued a warrant for Alfatih’s arrest on October 16, 2025, when he was already in custody for attacking a court bailiff who had come to check on more than £2,250 ($3,000) in unpaid parking fines owed by Alfatih’s wife.

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Footage played during the UK trial showed Alfatih brandishing a knife at the broken window of a van, leaving bailiff Kevin Bucknall with a cut to the back of his head.

On Friday, the Birmingham Crown Court found Alfatih guilty of unlawful wounding, possessing two knives and criminal damage, but acquitted him of the more serious charge of wounding with intent. He will be sentenced on January 11.

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Following the conviction, the court let UK media publish Alfatih’s name. He had previously gone by Mohammed Naim, and is the son of senior Hamas official Basem Naim.

Alfatih was born in Germany and raised in Gaza, where he served in the early 2000s as a bodyguard to Haniyeh. Amid claims of Egyptian persecution of Hamas, Alfatih later moved to the UK, where he was granted asylum in 2015 and made a citizen five years later.

At the time, Britain considered only Hamas’s armed wing a terrorist organization, but did not proscribe Hamas’s politburo until 2021. Haniyeh led the politburo from 2017 until Israel assassinated him in Tehran in 2024.

Alfatih’s Hamas connections, first reported by UK newspaper The Times in September, were not disclosed to jurors. A British government source quoted by the BBC called it “staggering” that Alfatih was granted asylum or citizenship.

Alfatih was the owner of weapons seized in Vienna last year as part of a multinational investigation that uncovered the terrorist plot he orchestrated, the Mossad said last November, referring to him as Mohammed Naim.

He allegedly helped procure weapons for three suspected Hamas operatives who were nabbed in Berlin a week before the second anniversary of the October 7 attack that sparked the war in Gaza.

According to the Mossad, he met with his father in Qatar in September 2025, suggesting “possible involvement of Hamas leadership in authorizing and directing terror activity in Europe.”

Hamas members in Turkey were also possibly involved in planning the attack, the Mossad said at the time.

AFP contributed to this report.

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