The horror in Hartlepool shames our midwit elites

Welcome to Britain, a safe haven for knife-wielding racist terrorists. That’s the disturbing impression left by the trial that has just concluded in Teesside, in which a Moroccan asylum seeker has been found guilty of murder and attempted murder. He tried to stab his housemate to death, before running into the streets of Hartlepool and murdering an elderly passerby. The killing spree was seemingly fuelled by his Islamist beliefs and his hatred of Israel and inspired by Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October. And there is no reason why this murdering, fascist scumbag should have ever been allowed to stay in this country for as long as he did.

On 15 October, at about 5am, 45-year-old Ahmed Alid burst into the bedroom of Javed Nouri, another asylum seeker with whom he shared a Home Office-provided house in Hartlepool. He slashed at Nouri, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’. ‘In the darkness’, explains the Crown Prosecution Service, Nouri ‘could not find the door handle to escape but managed to fight off Alid and disarm him during the attack’. Another of their housemates came to Nouri’s aid, and Alid ran out on to the street. There, he found 70-year-old Terence Carney. He stabbed Carney six times in the chest, abdomen and back. One fatal blow pierced his heart. CCTV footage shows Alid slashing as Carney cries, ‘No, no’.

A judge will decide whether Alid’s actions had a ‘terrorist connection’ at his sentencing in May. I dare say there’s a strong case. After he was apprehended, Alid chanted ‘For the people of Gaza’. ‘The whole issue is for the independence of Palestine’, he said, during his police interview. ‘It is between the Zionist entity and Hamas movement. They set a specific time for shooting and if this Zionist occupation does not leave, here in Britain there will be [a] flood, unrest.’ So this seems very likely to be the first Hamas-inspired, 7 October-inspired attack on British soil. In the days before the Hartlepool attack, former Hamas chief Khaled Mashal, from the safety and luxury of Qatar, called for Muslims the world over to ‘take to the streets’ that Friday for a ‘day of rage’. (Alid burst into Nouri’s room on Sunday morning.) He told police he killed Carney because Britain had ‘created’ Israel – the ‘Zionist entity’ – and ‘should make it leave’.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the authorities had ample opportunities to stop Alid before he picked up two kitchen knives that morning. And they missed them all. Nouri, an Iranian asylum seeker, went to the police on 13 October, saying he believed Alid was an ‘extreme Muslim’ and a ‘terrorist’. Alid would sit in the kitchen with a knife and give him ‘bad looks’, Nouri said, after realising he had converted to Christianity. After 7 October, Alid was found watching the massacres on his phone and laughing. The response? The manager of the state-funded housing they lived in agreed to have a word with him. A word with him. It’s almost darkly funny imagining how that conversation went: ‘Listen, Ahmed, you’ve got to give it a rest with the Hamas snuff videos and the knives. You’re upsetting the other residents.’ Cleveland Police say their hands were tied, because no ‘specific threats’ were reported at the time. The force has already been investigated and cleared by the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

But let’s be honest: it should never have got that far. Alid’s presence in Britain at all is a grim testament to an asylum system so dysfunctional, and so stricken with credulous ‘compassion’, that it is routinely putting the lives of British citizens and indeed asylum seekers at mortal peril. The court heard that Alid left Morocco for Europe in 2007, after having ‘a problem’ with the intelligence services. He wandered between 13 different countries, was deported from Finland and refused asylum in Germany, before entering Britain illegally in 2020. He only applied for asylum here after he was arrested during the pandemic, telling police he didn’t have any documents. After a spell in a migrant hotel in Hull, he was given accommodation in Hartlepool, where he lived for three years before going on his blood-thirsty rampage. When asked if his asylum application had been successful, he said: ‘I didn’t get an answer.’

There are those who will simply blame this on the asylum backlog, on the creaking British state’s inability to process claims in a timely fashion. No doubt that’s part of it. But going on recent form, it’s not at all obvious Alid would have been promptly deported if someone had just bothered to look at his application. Remember Abdul Ezedi – the Afghan south-London acid attacker who was granted asylum despite committing two sexual offences during his short time in Britain? Remember Emad al-Swealmeen, who had two failed asylum claims and one phoney conversion to Christianity under his belt when he blew himself up outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021? Remember that as-yet-unnamed serial flasher, who, it was revealed a few weeks back, was blocked from deportation on the grounds that his ‘sexually disinhibited behaviour’ could expose him to ‘serious harm’ in Taliban-run Afghanistan? (The prudes!) I dread to think what is going to happen if and when Alid gets out of prison. Perhaps he’ll claim asylum again, on the grounds that his Islamist terrorism would expose him to discrimination in his native Morocco. It’d be worth a punt.

Surely, now is the time to drop the virtue-signalling and admit that something has gone very badly wrong. The great and good seem incapable of discussing this issue seriously. Or at all. When Ezedi inflicted those stomach-turning, life-changing injuries on that woman and her children – a woman who was herself staying at a refugee hotel, seemingly looking for a better life in Britain – a government minister took to the airwaves to say, ‘this is not really about asylum’. Newsnight used it as a peg to have a discussion about microaggressions, so desperate were BBC journalists to deflect from the small matter of Ezedi’s asylum status. Whenever cases like Ezedi’s or Alid’s come up, midwit ‘centrists’ just stare blankly into the distance, reciting the same old lines about niceness and compassion and how ackshually Winston Churchill was really pro-refugee. Somehow I doubt that when Churchill signed us up to the Refugee Convention, Britain offering refuge to the world’s acid attackers, flashers and terrorists, yearning to breathe free as they flit from one safe European country to another like interrailing students, was what he had in mind.

I’m as pro-asylum as the next man. Indeed, I fear that the longer our asylum system remains a scumbags’ charter the more public support for it will wither away – and the more genuine, deserving asylum seekers will lose out. We’ve ended up with a system that almost no one could possibly defend – one in which Afghan soldiers who risked their lives to serve with Britain are hung out to dry, while Afghan sex offenders who arrive in Britain illegally and then immediately start sexually assaulting women are welcomed with open arms. And yet, people do defend it. Or at the very least they refuse to talk about it. Not because they care about asylum seekers, certainly not the Iranian stabbed by Alid or the woman disfigured by Ezedi. But because they care about themselves, about looking good and kind and caring. The Right Sort of Person. The horror in Hartlepool reminds us what a high price British citizens and asylum seekers are now paying for the elites’ narcissism.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_