Killer asylum seeker ‘asked schoolgirls out on dates’
Parents ‘fuming’ as Afghan who murdered aspiring Royal Marine was allowed to attend secondary school
AN AFGHAN asylum seeker who murdered an aspiring Royal Marine after posing as a 14-year-old to enter the UK asked schoolgirls on dates, parents have claimed, after he was jailed for life.
Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, 21, will have to serve a minimum of 29 years for stabbing Thomas Roberts to death during a row over an e-scooter in Bournemouth, Dorset, in the early hours of March 12, 2022.
Abdulrahimzai, who posed as a 14-year-old to enter the UK in 2019, was already on the run prior to the murder after gunning down two fellow migrants in Serbia in 2018. He had been convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison in his absence.
Yesterday, parents of children who attended the same secondary school where Abdulrahimzai was placed alleged that he had approached younger girls in the corridors. One mother, Abbie Mercy, wrote on social media: “This scumbag was placed... in my son’s year after he had murdered two people at pretty much point blank range... He was allowed to be with two of my children on a daily basis under the assumption he was 14. He was asking girls out.
‘He was allowed to be with my children on a daily basis under the assumption he was 14. He was asking girls out’
My anger is not with the school, I feel their hands were tied. It’s the local authority and the Government. Where’s the duty of care towards my children?”
Cherri Parsons, another parent, said: “I was fuming when I found out he had been placed in my 14-year-old daughter’s year group!
“Any kind of inappropriate behaviour could have occurred as he was asking 14-year-old girls out and changing with 14-year-old boys in PE... not to mention the fact he liked to carry knives around.”
The parents did not respond to The Daily Telegraph’s request for further comments. School authorities did not know that he had killed anyone while he was a pupil.
Yesterday, at Salisbury Crown Court, Wiltshire, Judge Paul Dugdale told Abdulrahimzai he had taken the life of a “thoroughly decent man with a bright future”. Roberts’s girlfriend told the court that all the 21-year-old had wanted was to “protect and serve” by joining the Royal Marines.
Sentencing Abdulrahimzai, Judge Dugdale said: “You spent 26 seconds of your life with [Roberts], at the end of which you stabbed him fatally twice to the chest with a large knife you routinely carried with you.
“You started the conflict and throughout you were the threatening aggressor. In seconds you took the life of a thoroughly decent man with a bright future who was loved greatly by so many people.”
Roberts’s parents and partner paid an emotional tribute to him in court. His father, Philip Roberts, said he missed his son “every day, every hour, every minute”.
Dolores Wallace, his mother, said “My heart bleeds, broken-hearted, knowing you are not here any more.”
Gemma Walker, Roberts’s partner, said she was “surviving but not living” since his murder and was “waiting for him to walk through the door”.
She added: “Every day I wake up knowing that Tom is no longer in bed lying by my side… He wanted to be a Marine, to protect and serve. To follow in his fathers’ footsteps and protect those against evil in the world where we cannot. We had a plan, a future planned where I could be with him and support him whilst he did this. It’s gone. His future is gone. My future is gone.”
On his journey from Afghanistan to Bournemouth, Abdulrahimzai travelled through at least five different countries. He was convicted of drug dealing in Italy, and sentenced to 20 years in a Serbian prison for murdering two of his countrymen in a remote village with a Kalashnikov in 2018.
After the murders he fled Eastern Europe and, despite having an asylum claim rejected by the Norwegian authorities in December 2019, was able to board a ferry in Cherbourg and travel to the UK. Abdulrahimzai was then placed with a female foster carer and awarded a place at a local secondary school.
He was a keen boxer and cricketer, even playing for a cricket club in Bournemouth. He posed with a knife on Tiktok, was filmed on Snapchat assaulting a man in the street, got into street fights for money and scared his foster carer with his love of knives.
When he was arrested in Bournemouth, Abdulrahimzai told officers he was 16, having arrived in the UK as a 14-year-old two years earlier. Later, tests carried out on his teeth ahead of the trial revealed that he was 21.
In mitigation, Jo Martin KC said he acted “spontaneously” when he killed Roberts. She added: “Any child born in Afghanistan around the early 2000s lived in a war-torn and fractured country, the impact that would have had on him is perhaps told in what happened to him later in his life.”
He may serve his minimum term in the UK and then do the same in Serbia, she said.
Britain doesn’t deport people to Afghanistan and won’t extradite Abdulrahimzai to Serbia unless they guarantee he can have a retrial, Ms Martin KC added.
The school Abdulrahimzai attended was last night approached for comment.