Coventry Labour candidate apologises for saying she would celebrate Tony Blair’s death

Zarah Sultana, a Labour candidate for Coventry South in the upcoming election, has been forced release a statement apologising for tweets saying she would celebrate the death of former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.

She has also had to deny accusations of anti-Semitism after anti-Semitic tweets were found on her social media.

Sultana was selected last week as a parliamentary candidate for Coventry South representing the Labour Party. She admitted to writing the posts when she was a student and that her account has since been deleted.

The Jewish Chronicle discovered tweets and Facebook posts from 2015 where Zarah said: "Don't celebrate the death of any person regardless of what they did, try and stop me when the likes of Blair, Netanyahu and Bush die".

In another Facebook post that was directed at a Jewish student, Zarah wrote "I can't believe a YT thinks she can represent us". 'YT' is a slang expression for a white person and is often used by people who are not white, to describe white people.

In another tweet from the same account, she referred to police dealing with London protests as "thugs".

She has since tweeted multiple times to apologise for these statements. Her apology reads: "I posted these tweets five years ago, when I was a student, from an account I then deleted.

"I wrote them out of frustration, rather than malice, in response to endless cycles of global suffering, violence and needless killing resulting from decisions by political leaders. In particular, the Iraq War and the killing of over 2,000 Palestinians in 2014, mostly civilians, condemned by the United Nations.

"I do not support violence and I should not have articulated my anger in the manner I did, for which I apologise".