A teenager who stabbed his Muslim cleric father to death in a row over the family TV is facing years behind bars today.

Moynul Haque, 18, attacked Mohammed Rahman, 43, with a kitchen knife before making a tearful 999 call in which he admitted: “I used a knife... killed him”.

Haque knifed his father, the imam at Chadwell Heath Educational and Cultural Society, Grove Road, Chadwell Heath, after the older man became enraged when he found the teenager had moved the family’s TV set into his bedroom.

Mr Rahman brandished a curtain pole as he chased the teenager downstairs into the kitchen, where he received a single stab wound to the heart.

The cleric, who had previously worked at the Euston Mosque in central London, was taken to The Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel but died from his injuries five days later.

Haque, of no fixed address, was on trial at the Old Bailey accused of murder, but a guilty plea to a lesser charge of manslaughter was accepted on the fourth day of the case.

He will be sentenced at Wood Green Crown Court on March 22.

Violence flared at around 8pm on September 30 at the family’s home in Melford Avenue, Barking, said prosecutor Philip Bennetts.

Haque’s mother, who had been married to the victim for 12 years, came upstairs to find the pair quarrelling, the court heard.

After an “exchange of words”, Mr Rahman punched his stepson and pushed him onto the bed, at which point the teenager retaliated and pushed his victim to the floor.

Mr Rahman then picked up a curtain pole and chased Haque downstairs into the kitchen, where the teenager stabbed him in the heart.

Haque told a 999 operator who asked if the attacker was nearby: “Yeah, the person who attacked him is me.”

Malik Chowdhury, of the Chadwell Heath Educational and Cultural Society, said today: “He [Mr Rahman] was very popular in this area.

“He was a very good human being and we never heard anything bad about him.”