One of the UK’s most high-profile religious and political content creators, Mohammed Hijab, has come forward with formal public allegations against British counter-terrorism authorities, claiming officers sought to recruit him as a confidential informant following a prolonged seizure of his personal electronic devices. Operating under the public moniker Mohammed Hijab, the creator — whose legal name is Mohamed Hegab — identifies as a religious philosopher currently pursuing a doctoral degree in the subject at the University of Birmingham. Boasting a YouTube subscriber base of over 1 million, he has built a widespread public profile for his rigorous, often high-stakes public debates spanning religious theology, global geopolitics, and Middle East policy, including recent high-profile appearances on Piers Morgan’s broadcast programs where he faced off against former Israeli military international spokesperson Jonathan Conricus. In a public, on-the-record post to his X (formerly Twitter) account dated November 4, 2026, Hijab laid out a timeline of the alleged encounter: on May 12, 2025, he was stopped at Gatwick Airport by officers operating under Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, a legislative provision that grants border and counter-terror teams broad authority to detain, question, and search individuals at ports of entry without requiring pre-existing reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity. During the stop, officers seized all of his personal electronic devices, which Hijab states were used to access and review more than 10,000 of his private messages. The devices were not returned to him until nearly four months later, on September 11, with no follow-up questions or formal charges filed against him. Following a formal subject access request for records related to the stop, Hijab received heavily redacted documentation from Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP). One unredacted handwritten line in the examining officer’s case notes explicitly reads “Doesn’t want to be an informant”, a detail he shared alongside a screenshot of the partially redacted CTP document, which bears the official agency watermark. He also published a second screenshot of an official letter dated May 18, 2025, from the Gatwick Borders Team under Counter Terrorism Policing South East, which formally notified him of a legal adjustment to the authority used to retain his seized property, with two full paragraphs of the correspondence redacted. The letter explicitly notes that the retention of his property does not confirm he is currently the subject of a criminal investigation, and pledged to return his belongings at the earliest possible opportunity, though no timeline was specified. Hijab has since elaborated on the incident in a YouTube address, disclosing that he was summoned for a voluntary police interview under caution as part of an ongoing active criminal investigation, which he asserts is largely focused on his pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli public activism. He went on to claim, without providing accompanying corroborating evidence, that the state of Israel was actively interfering with his work to curtail his public advocacy. At the time of publication, Middle East Eye (MEE) reached out to CTP London for an official statement addressing Hijab’s allegations, but no response had been received to the media outlet’s inquiry. It remains unclear whether the extensive redactions on the documents Hijab shared were applied by Counter Terrorism Policing prior to releasing the records to him, or if Hijab redacted the remaining content himself to protect the privacy of third parties and sensitive operational details.