Postman Tadeusz Potoczek had completed his deliveries for the day. At around 3 p.m. on 3 February, the 60-year-old was returning from work via the London underground, still wearing his red postman’s coat. As the southbound Victoria line train rumbled towards Oxford Circus, he headed for the far end of the platform, perhaps in the hope of getting a seat. To his left, he noticed a young man sitting on a bench, but he didn’t think much of it – his mind was on other things. Suddenly, the stranger got up and shoved him, hard, onto the tracks.
This failure of our asylum system almost led to an innocent postman being killed
It was a miracle that Mr Potoczek survived. The 750 volts running through the electrified rail would in all likelihood have killed him immediately had he touched it. Somehow he managed to avoid that grisly fate by staying on his feet after he fell onto the tracks. The underground driver slammed the brakes and managed to stop the train before it reached Potoczek, having spotted his red coat. A quick-thinking passerby, Oliver Matthews, pulled Potoczek to safety. Matthews later received £1,000 for his heroism.
The attack was ‘wholly unprovoked and spontaneous’, as the sentencing judge put it this week at Inner London Crown Court. This deranged attempted murder is disturbing for all concerned. The ordeal caused Mr Potoczek, a man of ‘robust character’, to suffer repeated nightmares and made him afraid to use the tube, though he needs to for his commute. The train driver, Bobby Walker, said he was ‘shaken very badly’. Judge Benedict Kelleher said it would ‘strike fear into every traveller on the underground’.
The man who pushed Mr Potoczeck was Brwa Shorsh, a homeless illegal immigrant from Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. At his trial, he told the court that a women passing on a previous train had allegedly laughed at him which made him angry, and that his victim – barely on the platform for seconds – gave him a ‘dirty look’, and he said he felt ‘disrespected’. The judge did not accept this, saying that he ‘wrongly perceived’ Mr Potoczeck to have been looking at him, and vented his anger in a ‘spontaneous decision to try to take away his life’. Convicted of attempted murder earlier this year, last week Shorsh was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of eight years.
The jury needed just half an hour to convict Shorsh for this crime, but the questions it raises about Britain’s asylum system are far more difficult to answer. Why was he still in the country? Who is to blame for this attack ever having taken place? And how many more people like him are now roaming our streets?
It is quite clear that Shorsh is the last person you want on the streets of a British city. Shorsh was denied asylum in Germany before being smuggled into the UK on the back of a lorry in 2018. He had also been denied asylum in France, he told the court.
In the time he had been in Britain, Shorsh had already committed a total of 21 crimes, for which he was convicted on 12 occasions. These include a racially aggravated offence of common assault, five offences of assault or battery, threatening a person in public with a weapon, a bike chain, and three offences of outraging public decency – that is, public masturbation, including on a District line train and at a Wandsworth café. On arriving in the UK, Shorsh was initially housed in Lincoln, before moving to London in late 2018 where he became homeless. Between 2019 and 2023 he served a total of six short prison sentences. His latest offence was an unprovoked attack on a female rail passenger in November 2023, whom he hit on the back of the head.
At the time of the attempted murder, Shorsh had stalled a bid by the Home Office to deport him by lodging an appeal with the immigration tribunal service. Details are scarce about that tribunal, but we can make a few educated guesses. Very likely, he was funded in that appeal by public money. (Possibly, he will have been supported by one of the charities that received £209 million in government grants since 2020 that lobbied against the previous government’s Rwanda Bill.) Very likely, the question that was being litigated when he tried to kill Mr Potoczek was not whether Shorsh had arrived here illegally (he had), nor whether he was a danger to public safety (clearly he was), but whether Kurdistan, his country of origin, was safe enough for him to be sent to, or some other human rights concern. It is very unlikely that the tribunal considered whether or not his presence in Britain benefited the country.
Nevertheless, four years after committing a sex crime, and six years after he entered Britain illegally, Shorsh remained in Britain. This failure of our asylum system almost led to an innocent postman being killed.
What’s worse is that this is far from an isolated incident. Few can have forgotten the case of the Clapham attacker, Abdul Ezedi, who attacked a mother and her two young children with a corrosive substance in south London earlier this year, before drowning himself in the Thames. Ezedi, incredibly, had been granted asylum on his third attempt after a questionable conversion to Christianity, despite having already committed two sexual offences in the UK.
Or take the monster Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, who in Bournemouth in 2022 stabbed to death a 21-year-old aspiring marine, Thomas Roberts. The litany of system failures that led up to Roberts’ tragic death is too long to list here, but as Tom Slater has put it, the ‘cascade of ineptitude and inaction is staggering’. On his way to Britain, Abdulrahimzai had murdered two Afghans with an AK-47 while in Serbia, and having lied about his age, ended up being put into a school in Poole in year ten where he roamed the corridors with a knife. Inexplicably, the Home Office has been spared an inquest into the death, a decision Roberts’ family say feels like ‘a cover-up’.
Indeed, it seems the dangers our asylum system is inflicting on the public are far from a priority for much of our political class. When it comes to illegal migration, Sir Keir Starmer simply bleats about ‘smashing the gangs’ that cross the Channel, a token policy, as many have pointed out, that fails to reckon with the enormous pull factors that bring illegal migrants to the country in the first place.
Or take the permanent secretary of the Home Office, Matthew Rycroft, who scarcely seems to share the major public concern about immigration and asylum. When he isn’t meeting civil servants to talk about transgender issues or writing the foreword for his department’s ‘Race Action Plan’, he is busy explaining to staff that the Home Office’s priorities are to ‘expand global talent visa routes’ and support victims of the Windrush scandal. When asked at a select committee last year about the number of deportations carried about by the Home Office, the top mandarin was unable to provide an answer. Little wonder that recent research has found that more than one in 100 people living in Britain is an illegal migrant, the highest per capita in Europe.
Yet think of the moralising outrage at any suggestion Britain might speed up this deportation process by leaving the ECHR – an outrage shared by much of the Tory party. It is telling that when a Remainer luminary like Dominic Grieve hotly denounces leaving the ECHR, he argues that it will reduce the UK’s ‘soft power’ and the ‘standards of behaviour you should expect from a civilised state’. Questions of border security, public safety and the national interest, it seems, don’t quite make the list.
That should worry us all. Unless these concerns become top priorities for our political class, the public will continue to suffer the consequences of violent thugs like Brwa Shorsh roaming the streets.
Comments