Tell MAMA welcomes the life-sentencing today of Pavlo Lapshyn, 25, who murdered an 82-year-old Muslim grandfather and bombed three mosques in the Midlands during a spike in anti-Muslim incidents following the Woolwich murder of Lee Rigby.
Holding strong neo-Nazi beliefs, Pavlo Lapshyn, a promising PhD student from Ukraine’s Russian minority, followed the classic lone wolf pattern: self-radicalising, influenced by Anders Breivik and neo-Nazi ideologue William Pierce (who inspired Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh) and ‘buying into’ the Counter-Jihadist narrative followed by the EDL and other anti-Muslim movements that believe Muslims are “taking over”.
“Lapshyn got 40 years today, for a reign of terror and murder which was designed to ignite a racial/religious war in the UK,” said Fiyaz Mughal, director of the Tell MAMA anti-Muslim hatred monitoring project.
“It was only thanks to luck that people were not injured by his bombs – he miscalculated Friday prayer times during Ramadan – yet that was too late for an elderly, widely-respected grandfather, Mohammed Saleem, 82, murdered in the most cowardly fashion by a young man who stabbed him in the back, then stamped on his head and left him to die. His actions are beneath contempt. The irony, for those who profess to have left the Far Right behind them, is that Lapshyn was himself an immigrant who was carrying out attacks on those already settled here in the UK.”
“Today we join with the Muslim community, and other peace and faith activists, in calling for an end to such hatred. The Government must finally wake up to the threat of right-wing extremism in this country, particularly with the breakup of the EDL and fragmenting of the BNP, and do something before more any more psychopaths such as Lapshyn attempt to kill innocent Britons.”
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– Tell MAMA is a national hate crime project that supports victims of anti-Muslim prejudice. Further information can be found here: www.tellmamauk.org