Fresh dangers of ‘going country’

HARRY BELL

The acid attack by drug peddler Fahad Abdi in a Canterbury street during daylight hours makes for grim reading this week.

Just like terrorist atrocities, acid attacks are growing increasingly frequent on Britain’s streets.

It is incredible that the 18-year-old “east Londoner” even believed he could carry out and get away with such an act in St Peter’s Place, one of the most heavily trafficked streets in the city, at 4pm during a Friday rush hour.

Part of this stems from the fact that those who commit crimes fear little from the criminal justice system.

In this instance Kent Police should be congratulated for swiftly nicking this nasty sod near the railway station before he could escape to London. The Crown Prosecution Service also deserves praise for successfully bringing the case to conclusion, even though Abdi’s three victims did not want to support it.

But that’s where the good news ends. Abdi was handed a nine-year sentence by Canterbury Crown Court, which, as everyone knows, means he’ll do half. He’ll be 22 when he’s released.

The system of halving sentences is thoroughly dishonest, a deliberate cheat intended to deceive the public into thinking sentences are tougher than they really are – even though everyone knows they’re not.

What everyone also knows is that prison is bed and breakfast, telly, computer games and drugs. It’s like a dodgy youth club for adults.

This was laid bare in a Panorama documentary broadcast earlier this year which showed prisoners high on drugs, refusing to obey guards and even slipping out through a hole in the fence to go nightclubbing.

Our prisons are full because they’re cushy and because they hold no fear for those who find themselves in and out of them. It is in fact very hard to get into one since the authorities do everything to keep offenders out of them.

There are two primary routes in. The first is establishing a criminal record so lengthy that courts cannot find a reason not to jail someone.

The second is the route taken by Fahad Abdi – which is to commit a serious offence and be unlucky enough to find the cops on their A-game.

But what was Abdi was doing in Canterbury in the first place? – and I’m going to resort to some slang here.

He was engaged in a practice known as “going country”, where organised crime gangs from London send young men to urban areas around the south-east to sell class A drugs, most usually crack cocaine and heroin, known as “white” and “brown” on the streets. Some even sell “speedball”, a potent and lethal combination of both.

Over the last 20 years in Canterbury, heroin was usually sold by users who dealt to support their own habits.

Now that organised criminals are involved, the ante has been upped. Street dealers work for very dangerous people who will visit harm upon them or their families if they fail to deliver the returns they are expected to.

It’s no wonder that someone like Abdi was willing to squirt acid at his victims. It’s the world he has come to know.

Unless the authorities start rounding these people up and unless the prisons become places criminals do not want to go, we might as well accept that such incidents will happen with increasing frequency on the streets of Canterbury.

And that is truly frightening.

Fahad Abdi has been locked up for a triple acid attack in Canterbury