Acid attack in Clapham

[PawsAndReflection]

Has anyone else seen this horrible news story? Apparently 9 people have been injured, looks like the original targets were a woman and two children.

What is WRONG with people?!

He got asylum because he lied about converting.
That means his asylum status is invalid.
And given that he was apparently planning on popping back to Afghanistan for a wife he seems to have lied about being in danger too.

This is the information I read (it is aimed at asylum seekers):

The immigration rules are now weighted very much in favour of deporting a person after a criminal sentence.

The rules state that if you were sentenced for more than 12 months, your deportation is “conducive to the public good and in the public interest”. The rules also say that your deportation is “conducive to the public good and in the public interest” if your offending “caused serious harm” as determined by the Home Office, or you are a “persistent offender who shows a particular disregard for the law”, irrespective of how long you were sentenced for.

If you are liable to deportation, your spouse or civil partner and/or your child are also liable to be deported unless they have Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK in their own right, or are British, or have been living apart from you.

If you were sentenced to more than four years, the Home Office guidance says you will need to have “very compelling circumstances” in order for a deportation order not to be made or to be revoked. The courts, however, may have a different interpretation of what counts as those circumstances than the Home Office.

The Govt is discouraging courts to hand out sentences less than 12 months, with the emphasis on non custodial for so called "minor offences".
This man got 48 weeks (i believe suspended)

imho any criminal conviction should mean an asylum claim is automatically rejected.

However, in this mans case, where could he be deported too?

Why care?

Because I want Britain to be a safe place for refugees. And I want us to accept asylum seekers, and process them on the basis of whether they are being persecuted.

Tribunals will make mistakes - and I bet this case will be scrutinised carefully now with the benefit of hindsight - and of course you can be desperate to stay for a better life (economic migrant) without needing asylum.

I think terms are sometimes used interchangeably, which is unfortunate.

That would be the case if he were an immigrant with (or entitled to hold) a second nationality of country which it is safe to deport people to.

But he's a refugee, and has no safe country to be sent to. We're stuck with him unless/until circumstances change and refugees can return.

I expect he'll get a pretty hard time in prison here - corrosive attacks are at least GBH with intent (maximum sentence, life) plus there's the use of a car as a weapon (drove into the woman) and the attack of the DC who was in the car (plus anything else not on the video clip that's been in the press).

So maybe at the end of it, the world will have moved on and it will indeed be safe to deport him.

@SquirmOfEels Under the lenient sentences act, a man who was originally given 8 years for life changing acid attack, had his sentence increased to 11 years plus 3 years out on licence.

I don't know if he'll get parole but even without, 11 years seems no deterrent at all.
I doubt Afghanistan would have changed much over the next 10 or 15 years.

We certainly need to be stopping entry to the UK by boat etc though how we do that is another debate altogether, far easier said than done.

Last year there was almost 1000 acid throwing attacks.

These chemicals need to be licenced and not for sale to the general public, would stop all attacks but would certainly over time reduce them.

Agree re tube, did no one see him

Listening to someone on this it’s hard to ban as every day products can be used in harmful ways as you say

Would you really stop him or approach? People advised not to approach him.

Yes, how can you patrol or ban chemicals and eceryday products being sold? You can’t really. Or do you quiz any “brown” person buying them? No. Bit like knives can’t be sold to underage kids but they can still swipe them off their households or buy from friends etc.

You can’t even license or prohibit the sale of fireworks locally (yeah I know we all love a good firework on MN) so good luck getting chemical products banned or restricted for sale.

I wouldn’t expect people to approach him but surely they could report seeing him, with his injury he is very distinctive

God no not stop him but call police

Maybe they were unaware of the story still, which is highly possible

Agree on chemicals. I don’t want an uplift in these types of attacks, horrendous, who is doing it and why this

Agree re tube, did no one see him

On the first evening, no-one would have known they needed to be on the look out for someone of that description.

So yes, people might have seen him, but only told the police later when they became aware it was a manhunt. Which might be how they knew to look round King's Cross (maybe someone reported him getting off there) and later on the Victoria Line.

Have the police said where they think he got off the Victoria Line? There were addresses raided in East London (family?) but I've seen nothing about any other places (except Newcastle upon Tyne) that he's familiar with. Have I missed something, or is it that the police either don't have or aren't sharing further info? (seems a bit odd as they're now actively soliciting public vigilance)

The only corrosive chemicals i know that are very fast acting is battery acid and caustic soda, i'm sure there are others.

Neither are items of "every day use" try buying them in Tesco?

Modern batteries no longer need to be topped up and get a drain cleaning company in to unblock your sink or stop pouring fat down it.

Who really needs to make soap?

My FiL needs rodent poison, he had to do a course to get a licence to buy the stuff, same could be done for soap makers etc.

The point I'm making is that all the posters who seem to think there would be no problem if the guy had not very been let into the country/allowed to stay basically think it's fine for him to maim women and children as long as they're not British women and children, and as long as he wasn't doing it on British streets. Whereas I think the problem is he did it at all. Not that he did it here.

Also the idea women can "influence" misogynistic men of any nationality I frankly laughable. We've had almost a century of quite vocal feminism in this country, and the men who hate women hate them worse than ever they did. The idea that there's something WOMEN can do to stop men hating them is pretty fucking victim-blamey imo.

Would you be this blasé if it was god forbid someone you knew?

I don’t want to let criminals in, we need checks before we say yes like other countries do successfully

I can only hope ‘terrible things are happening around the world so let’s have them here’ is a minority view

It's not a question of helping. The point I'm making is this guy being here or being there makes no difference, he'd still b a violent misogynist. Your daughter's haven't been harmed by him. Someone's daughter has. Maybe a British woman, maybe an Afghani woman. Sarah Everard's mother's daughter was murdered in almost the last exact same spot, by a white British man brought up in "our" culture. The problem is not middle eastern men, or refugee men, or immigrant men, the problem is MEN who hate and subjugate women around the globe and RIGHT HERE. If you want to tell me this guy is a worse guy than the whiter than white brother of Amber Gibson, or the whiter than white British guy who raped her corpse, will laugh at you. The problem is MEN. Thinking you can protect your daughters by keeping out all but the British men is total nonsense. In fact the very best advice you could give them to keep them safe is not to date or live with any man at all, as the most dangerous man to any woman statistically is her current or ex partner, regardless of ethnicity or country of origin. Although of course she may just get stabbed for rejecting them like the poor schoolgirl in Camden (perp also not an immigrant by anything I've heard).

Men are the problem. The race-baiting is a distraction from this absolutely essential truth women need to recognise if they are ever going to make themselves safer.

Of course it’s a problem he did it at all to anyone. However my priorities on safety are to feel safe in my country, that my children and family are safe in our country where we live.

We have enough homegrown criminals here without importing more.

We can accept that it’s men who are the problem full stop and still understand it’s stupid to import more male criminals 👍🏻

Why on earth would having these violent men here be a positive?

It’s madness

Some of my best female friends are immigrants to this country. Do I just not care if they are raped and maimed then? Or not as much as if a stranger British woman is? One of my friends has moved to Israel, do I care about her more or less than my British neighbour? I have a friend who is a Pakistani and she has migrated to the USA - I mean is she so far outside of "my own" I really shouldn't care at all if she is abused, raped and murdered? I mean certainly not more than I should care about the woman who was struck over the head with a paving slab, dragged behind the bins and raped by a local (white British) teen on my local park not long ago?

Women are my people. All of them. All over the world. Even the ones I don't much like a d could never agree with. Because by our immutable female biology we AS A CLASS are victimised and oppressed by the class of men. Nationality is irrelevant to this fact which has been true in ever culture in every country all over the world since forever. THAT is the threat I recognise, not misogynist men moving from one country to another.

So a heinous criminal wanted in his country comes here claims asylum but we can't send him back as he will be persecuted! Fuck off!

You would prefer those rapes and acid attacks here?

I can only hope your view is not shared

Btw there is a way to help women. You deter all arrivals and set up schemes which vet and allow only women if that’s what you’d prefer

We do not need to say yes to violent men.

You are arguing with a point I haven't made. My point isn't that we can white-saviour Afghanistan. We can't and won't. Women will die in hundreds fighting their oppression there, it's already happening. I hope that they win. And I hope any who manage to make their way out are given refuge here or in another safer country.

The point I am making is that this man's nationality is irrelevant. What's relevant is his misogyny and his willingness to a t on it. Women and girls in the UK are unsafe anyway, even if we never accepted another male afghani refugee, because misogyny is global and gathering in courage here as it is everywhere else. I could reel off a list of white British men who have committed unspeakable crimes against women and children in the past year, there is a whole twitter feed devoted to their victims, the majority of the perpetrators mentioned are white British (as you'd expect given our demographics). The Amber Gibson case sticks out in my mind,as does the tragic case of Zara Aleena who was sexually assaulted and murdered just down the road from where I used to live by a White British guy.

Thinking that keeping the Afghani men out of England will make any appreciable difference to our safety or that of our daughters is a nice fantasy but it simply isn't true. The problem is misogynist men. I'll be no happier if my daughters are abused, raped, murdered by a white man than by a brown one.