Meet the Afghan migrant who threatened to kill Farage

Even before Fayaz Khan was jailed for threatening to kill Nigel Farage, there were signs this was not the kind of person we’d want to welcome with open arms to the UK.

The first thing you notice about the Afghan migrant, who achieved fame on TikTok for broadcasting his journey to Britain, is the large tattoo on his face of an AK-47. He had also racked up multiple convictions, before he had even arrived on our shores. You could hardly ask for a starker illustration of the threat posed to Britons by the untrammeled flow of small boats over the English Channel.

Afghan migrant Fayaz Khan has been found guilty of making a threat to kill Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in a TikTok post. Fayaz Khan, 26, made the threat to kill the politician between October 12 and 15 last year in a video on the social media platform that Mr Farage said was… pic.twitter.com/5sJQVm6WTO

— Murtaza Ali Shah (@MurtazaViews) October 10, 2025

Earlier today, Khan was sentenced to five years in prison for making a death threat to the Reform UK leader. In a video posted on TikTok last year, filmed from a migrant camp in Calais, Khan vowed to ‘come to England’ so that he could ‘pop pop pop’ Farage (or ‘Englishman Nigel’, as he called him). He made a gun-finger pose, pointed to the gun tattoo on his face and headbutted his phone’s camera. He also threatened to ‘marry’ Farage’s sister, for good measure. ‘I mean what I say’, he said in a follow-up post. He then made his way to Britain on a small boat.

Worse still, Khan arrived on these shores with a string of convictions under his belt. Southwark Crown Court heard that he had been convicted of 17 offences on 12 separate occasions in Stockholm, where he had lived between 2019 and 2024. Farage, in a video posted after the sentencing, alleges that Khan was fleeing yet another charge in Sweden for child pornography.

Mercifully, Khan was detained on arrival before he could pose a threat to others. And unlike most Channel migrants, he was actually charged with an offence for entering the country illegally. Farage says that had he not been sent the video of the threats, and alerted the authorities, Khan would have likely ended up like most other new arrivals: housed in a hotel or HMO, and free to wander the streets as he pleased.

Indeed, it may still be the case that Khan, on release, will remain in the UK. He could try to claim asylum. Although he told the court that he wants to return to Afghanistan, only a negligible number of Afghan criminals have been returned since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Meanwhile, the UK immigration courts, wielding the European Convention on Human Rights, have generally bent over backwards to ensure few foreign-born criminals are ever sent home.

Of course, it would be wrong to suggest that all or even a majority of small-boat migrants pose as much of a threat as Fayaz Khan. But failing to stem the arrivals of unchecked and unvetted men, who are then dispersed around the country, clearly carries a non-negligible risk. At least 200 asylum-hotel residents have been charged with crimes this year, 109 of them violent and 44 of them sexual. Combine that with a justice system that is reluctant to remove them, even when their crimes are incredibly serious, and we suddenly have an explosive situation on our hands.

The case of the migrant who threatened to kill Farage shows exactly why it is so dangerous to lose control of our borders.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.