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A KEY Labour campaign team organiser previously sent to prison for helping to rig an election in Peterborough, has been hired AGAIN by the Labour party and today is out ‘influencing’ votes in the Peterborough by-election.

In 2008, Tariq Mahmood, now 51, was convicted alongside fellow Labour members Maqbool Hussein and former Peterborough Mayor Mohammed Choudhary for forgery over a devious scheme to fabricate votes for the Peterborough City Council election of June 2004.

The four-month case that saw Mahmood (a Labour Party Secretary) sentenced to a 15-month porridge stint cost the taxpayer a whopping £850,000.

“They were able to get hold of postal votes and proxy votes which belonged to voters in the Central Ward,” Prosecuting QC Anthony Leonard said. “They arranged for postal votes and ballot papers to be sent not to the voter but to addresses which each defendant was connected”.

Despite his proven lust for vote-rigging and disregard for British democracy (or perhaps because of it), Mahmood was quickly snapped up by the local Labour Party to “help” win the Parliamentary seat for Labour in 2017, in which Fiona Onasanya went on to beat popular incumbent Tory MP and staunch Brexiteer Stewart Jackson by a mere 607 votes.

Mahmood was also found to have made extremist remarks on Facebook during the election campaign in which he alleged that Theresa May had been behind recent terrorist attacks, leaving many residents furious.

“I saw him walking around with them in his red rosette,” said another local, “knocking on doors, intimidating voters outside the polling station near my house, and playing a big part in getting his ‘Labour gang’ to influence people living nearby. It’s shocking really that he’d be allowed to do that unchallenged”.

Other reports from concerned residents (all reported to Onasanya but inevitably ignored) included complaints of large groups of young Pakistani men loitering menacingly outside key polling stations wearing Labour rosettes, members of the public being pelted with eggs and verbally abused, a local election candidate’s team member being physically assaulted, and a volunteer Tory teller having a camera phone held in his face inside one of the polling stations (a highly illegal act) whilst being racially taunted in a disturbing online video. Other eyewitnesses detailed seeing lines of Eastern Europeans and young Brits being ushered into central polling stations – allegedly having been coerced into voting red in exchange for cash. They were then seen ushered one after the other in and out of a nearby 4×4 where it is alleged that the exchanging of money took place. On the evening of the election Police were called and made aware of the ongoing situation and its dramatic scale yet responded that they did not have the resources to deal with it.

“Someone came to my door and said they’d give me £10 if I vote for the Labour guy” one young local Polish resident informed us, referring to Labour candidate Matthew Mahabadi who stood in a local by-election held on the same day and who recently resigned after ‘being bullied for calling out anti-Semitism’. “Another one of my neighbour’s said she was offered money to vote for Fiona but shut door [SIC] on them”.

Controversial Local Labour Councillor Ed Murphy was also reported to have boasted on the night of the count: “We’d signed up over 500 Eastern Europeans for postal votes within weeks of the election being called”.

And today, Politicalite can exclusively reveal that – despite repeated complaints to the electoral commission and to the Labour Party Head Office, Tariq Mahmood is STILL being allowed to act as a key member of the Labour Party’s campaign team in Peterborough.

Mahmood has been spotted wearing his red rosette, accompanied by a throng of abusive Labour trolls, loitering outside polling stations and speaking to voters ‘off the record’.

“When are they ever going to get that man to f*ck off?” One angry local resident asked. “He makes a complete mockery of democracy and the right to vote. It’s been the D-Day anniversary today – marking when soldiers died to protect our right to vote in a free country. Labour letting a criminal like him walk around opposing democracy, is a p*ss take”.

Politicalite approached the Labour Party yet again for comment but received no reply at the time of publishing.