Nadine Osman
A Jewish man has been jailed for 28 months after threatening to kill Muslims at two Manchester mosques, prompting Muslim leaders to call for dedicated Government funding for mosque security.
Gabriel Levy, 21, from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, pleaded guilty to two counts of making threats to kill and was sentenced at Leeds Crown Court on August 25.
On October 4, 2025, Levy called Al-Sunnah Mosque in Cheetham Hill from a withheld number and told the person who answered: “I’m going to come to your mosque and kill you.”
Police attended his home within hours and seized his phone. Levy said he made the call because he was angry about what he had seen in the news, claiming it was in response to an attack on the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue two days earlier, in which a British-Syrian man drove into pedestrians and stabbed worshippers during Yom Kippur. Two people were killed.
Investigators found Levy had also called Iqra Mosque in Manchester that day, telling a member of staff: “I am going to kill you Muslim.”
His phone contained Islamophobic and racist messages and hate speech. The sentence included a 10-month uplift for the hate crime element, applied for by Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) prosecutors.
Aamir Sajad, Senior Crown Prosecutor, said: “No one has the right to make other people feel like their life is at risk just for doing their job.”
Levy, he added, “gave no thought to who was at the other end of the phone”, while claims that he had no intention of causing harm “means nothing to those on the receiving end”.
Sajad said threats to kill and Islamophobic hate crime would be treated “extremely seriously” by prosecutors.
Following the conviction, the Forum of Muslim Organisations (FMO) in Greater Manchester called for dedicated Government funding to strengthen mosque security.
The FMO said threats against a mosque affected “hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people who simply wish to pray in safety”.
