Britain’s asylum crisis

Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, 21, an Afghan convicted this week of murdering a man in Bournemouth last year, had previously murdered two men in Serbia. He had also been caught drug-dealing in Italy. He had been allowed to stay in the UK despite doubts about his claim to be 14 years old (he was then 18) and was placed with a foster carer and enrolled in a secondary school. When his foster carer caught him carrying a knife, a social worker was sent to his home to give him a talk about the dangers of knives. 

The case of Abdulrahimzai shows just how easy it is to outwit our authorities. It tells the world that Britain no longer has the will to guard its borders and that encourages more dangerous criminals to take advantage of the system. For this reason, it appears very much as if Britain is doomed to follow Sweden, whose fatal naivety and ineffective asylum policy led to crisis five years ago.

In Sweden, dangerous, grown men were put in children’s accommodation after claiming to be school age. The public, not as easily fooled as the authorities, began to protest. These protests became violent and Sweden’s asylum centres are now subject to arson attacks. Asylum claimants disappeared into the Swedish underworld. Gangland warfare intensified and police lost control.

It should be no surprise then that attacks on asylum centres are beginning to take place here and no surprise that public support for asylum is beginning to collapse, as it has done in Sweden.

Abdulrahimzai is far from alone in hoodwinking the system by pretending to be a child. Ahmed Hassan, jailed for 34 years in 2018 for the Parsons Green Tube bombing, had falsely claimed to be 16. He, too, was placed with unsuspecting foster parents. Between January 2018 and September 2022, 17,600 asylum applications were made by people claiming to be unaccompanied minors.