An official at the Muslim Council of Britain has repeated his view that Osama bin Laden was a "freedom fighter" when he fought the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Inayat Bunglawala, the council's media secretary who has been appointed by the Home Office as a "convener" of a government working group to combat extremism, told the Financial Times: "He [Mr bin Laden] was a freedom fighter. He was regarded in large sections of the Muslim world before 2001 as a freedom fighter for what he had done in Afghanistan."