Hate crimes against mosques double

● Figures from 45 police forces show big increase in crimes of racist abuse and threats

Hate crimes targeting mosques and other Muslim places of worship across the UK more than doubled between 2016 and 2017, a Press Association investigation has found.

Police forces recorded 110 hate crimes directed at mosques between March and July this year, up from just 47 over the same period in 2016.

Racist abuse and threats to “bomb the mosque” feature heavily among the hate crimes, as do incidents of offenders smashing windows on buildings and parked cars.

Other records include offensive graffiti sprayed on to buildings, violent assaults on worshippers, two cases of arson and two cases of individuals leaving bacon on door handles at mosques.

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott called the figures “deeply troubling”.

“Attacks on any religious group or minority are abominable,” she said, adding: “These anti-muslim attacks will be condemned by all decent people.”

The data was obtained by the Press Association through Freedom of Information requests to UK police forces. The figures are based on 42 responses from 45 forces.

Due to differences in how police forces record their statistics and the fact that not all forces are included in the figures, the true number of hate crimes directed at mosques is likely to be higher still.

Britain endured a number of terror attacks claimed by Islamic State over the period in which the crimes were recorded, at London Bridge, Westminster and Manchester.

The figures come to light within weeks of separate incidents in which an imam and surgeon who treated Manchester bombing victims was stabbed outside a mosque in Cheshire and a 14-year-old boy was stabbed multiple times in the face and neck outside a mosque in Birmingham.

Other high-profile cases of hatecrimeatmosquesthisyear include the Finsbury Park terror attack in June, a Manchester mosque gutted by fire in an arson attack in July and the sending of a white powder and bombthreatstothreemosques across London in July.

While police found the powder to be harmless, Erkin Guney, a community leader at one of the mosques targeted by the letters, called the threats “heartbreaking”.

The Shacklewell Lane Mosque in north London, where Mr Guney is funeral director, has seen “attacks by the BNP, pigs’ heads thrown at the door and buildings set alight” over the years since his father founded the mosque in the 1970s, he said.

More than 50 places of worship, almost half of them mosques, applied for the most recentroundofanti-hatecrime funding from the fovernment, which ended in June.

Ms Abbott called on the Home Office to publish data on hate crimes against all places of worship “as a matter of course” after “worrying reports of attacks on synagogues as well as mosques”.

“There should be a unanimous message that violence against any section of our society is unacceptable.”

A Home Office spokesman said: “All forms of hate crime are completely unacceptable and the UK has some of the strongest laws in the world to tackle it.”