The killer who claimed asylum

Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai and Thomas Roberts only spent 26 seconds in each other’s company. But it was enough to cost Roberts his life. In the early hours of 12 March 2022, Abdulrahimzai was roaming the streets of Bournemouth looking for trouble. He got into an argument over an e-scooter with a friend of Roberts’s outside a Subway sandwich shop. Roberts got between them. He gave Abdulrahimzai a (by the sounds of it) well-earned slap. Then Abdulrahimzai pulled out a 10cm-long blade and plunged it twice into Roberts’s chest. One of the blows pierced his heart. Roberts collapsed, bled profusely and died soon after in hospital. The nightclub DJ and aspiring Royal Marine was just 21.

The age of his killer is a more complicated story – and at the heart of a series of failures that led up to that fatal encounter. Abdulrahimzai, originally from Afghanistan, arrived in the UK on Boxing Day 2019. He had been stowed away in a vehicle, on a ferry from Cherbourg to Poole. He presented to the authorities and told them he was 14, but no age assessment was carried out. It is now believed he was actually 19 at the time. Had more extensive fingerprint and background checks taken place, officials would have found out that, since leaving Afghanistan in 2015, Abdulrahimzai had drifted between Serbia, Norway and Italy. He was convicted of drug offences in Italy, refused asylum in Norway and tried in his absence in 2020 in Serbia, for shooting two fellow Afghans to death with an AK-47. Serbian police believe it was part of a row over people smuggling. The Home Office has just been spared an inquest into the case.

The cascade of ineptitude and inaction is staggering. Abdulrahimzai was trouble from the start. He reportedly intimidated girls at his school into sending him explicit photos. He was removed from his foster home after he tried to headbutt his foster carer. He developed an interest in knives and street fighting. Police were warned seven times he was carrying knives, but nothing was done about it. Members of his cricket club told the police he was carrying a machete just two days before he killed Roberts. Dorset Police say no weapon was found and no arrest was made. ‘Officers made enquiries at his address to try and locate him during the early hours of Friday 11 March 2022’, reads a statement, ‘but they were not able to make contact with him’. Abdulrahimzai had become so notorious, violent and erratic, that when news broke of a murder committed by a young Afghan, those who knew him knew it was him instantly. And yet, chance after chance to intervene was missed.

Much of this hinged on his ‘age’. The Mail reports that Abdulrahimzai was fingerprinted when he arrived in the UK, but his ‘records were not run through international police and asylum computer systems because, at the time, he was being treated as a minor’. But this enormous oversight cannot be explained by the deceptive powers of Abdulrahimzai alone. Flags were raised, but nothing happened. In January 2020, within weeks of Abdulrahimzai’s arrival, his foster carer raised questions about his age, after a dentist suspected he was much older than he said he was. Still, no age assessment ever took place, as the authorities felt a mental-health assessment should take priority.

The deflections of Dorset Police also stretch credibility. They were apparently unaware of his criminal history until they began investigating the murder. True enough, his previous convictions were reportedly ‘not marked on any police databases or intelligence systems’. But this hardly absolves Dorset’s finest of their own outrageous failings here. According to the force’s internal investigation, ‘there was no evidence that Dorset Police officers were aware of any direct intention or threat made by Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai to harm anyone and the level of risk he posed was not known’. Yes, perhaps he’d been acquiring all those knives for entirely innocent, recreational purposes. Whittling maybe.

Abdulrahimzai was given a life sentence, with a minimum of 29 years, in court earlier this year. But that is hardly the end of the matter. Not least because stories like this are becoming alarmingly frequent. Before him, there was Abdul Ezedi, who was granted asylum, on the third attempt, after committing two sexual offences in the UK, thanks to a bogus conversion to Christianity. He killed himself earlier this year, shortly after throwing a corrosive substance over a woman and her children, believed to be residents in a refugee hotel in Clapham, south London. There was Emad al-Swealmeen, who blew himself up outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021. He also had two failed asylum claims and a fake conversion to Christianity to his name. Then there is Ahmed Alid, who left his native Morocco in 2007, following ‘a problem’ with the intelligence services. He floated between 13 different countries, was deported from Finland and refused asylum in Germany, before entering the UK illegally in 2020 and ending up in Hartlepool. In October last year, he became obsessed with Hamas’s pogrom in Israel. An Iranian asylum seeker, one of Alid’s housemates, tried to warn police, to no avail. A few days later, Alid attacked that housemate before stabbing a 70-year-old passerby to death.

Each of these cases reflects a toxic mix of dysfunction, ‘human rights’ constraints and plain old incompetence. (Abdulrahimzai claimed to have been tortured by the Taliban, meaning his removal to Afghanistan would have been all but impossible.) But there is also a kind of systemic credulity at play – a learned refusal to believe that some, and I stress some, of the people who come here claiming asylum might not be telling the truth and indeed might pose a threat to British citizens – and indeed to other asylum seekers. In Hartlepool as in Clapham, those looking for a better life have also borne the brunt of the British state’s inability to sort those who need and deserve safe haven from those who are a danger to those around them. Plus, while prolific sex-offender Ezedi and double-murderer Abdulrahimzai were allowed to stay, some of their countrymen back in Afghanistan, those who fought with British forces and desperately need our help, who are public enemy No1 as far as the resurgent Taliban regime is concerned, have been all but abandoned to their grisly fate.

We have ended up with an asylum system no one could possibly defend – one that can be readily exploited by bad actors while the deserving languish abroad in peril. The longer this goes unacknowledged by the great and good, for whom the asylum / migration issue is where their common sense goes to die, the longer British citizens and would-be refugees will pay the price, and the more public support for any kind of generous, but sane, asylum policy will drain away.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater