LONDON (AFP) — A Muslim peer who helped defuse a diplomatic dispute with Sudan last year has admitted sending mobile phone texts while driving, just before he was involved in a fatal car crash.
Lord Nazir Ahmed admitted on Monday to charges of dangerous driving over the incident on Christmas Day last year, in which a man died when the peer's Jaguar car collided with an Audi car which had stopped in the fast lane of a motorway.
But his lawyer denied Ahmed -- who suffered facial injuries and shock in the December 25 crash -- was responsible for the death of Slovakian Martyn Gombar, 28.
The court was told how Ahmed, 51, sent and received a series of five text messages while driving in the dark along the M1 motorway in South Yorkshire.
But Ahmed's solicitor Steve Smith said his client was not to blame for Gombar's death, arguing that the evidence "clearly shows now that he was not responsible for the death of that unfortunate man," Smith said.
"Whilst it is not his responsibility, it is not his fault, he still bears the death of this man at the forefront of his mind," he added.
The crash happened only weeks after Ahmed and another Muslim peer, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, travelled to Sudan to secure the release of a British teacher jailed for insulting Islam by naming a teddy bear after the Prophet Mohammed.
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