The Guardian reports: The British National party leader, Nick Griffin, has paid a surprise visit to Syria after being invited by the regime of the president, Bashar al-Assad, to take part in a fact-finding visit to the war-torn country.

Writing on Twitter, Griffin said he wanted to highlight the risk that the UK government’s support for opposition fighters seeking to oust Assad could plunge the Middle Eastern state into an “Iraq-style hell of sectarian hate“.

He linked the kind of Islamist militancy espoused by some of the rebels with the murder of the soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich last month.

The BNP spokesman Simon Darby said Griffin, who is an MEP for North-West England, was invited to Damascus as part of a delegation of European politicians, including MEPs and MPs from Belgium, Russia and Poland. [Continue reading…]