Murder Stirs British Debate on the Roots of Extremism
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Pavlo Lapshyn, a gifted 25-year-old engineering student from Ukraine, had come to Britain after winning a prestigious placement at a software company. A special awards ceremony had been held at the British ambassador’s residence in Kiev, and in April Mr. Lapshyn arrived in Birmingham. Five days later, he took a knife, roamed the streets of a multiethnic Birmingham neighborhood and stabbed a bearded man three times in the back, killing him. He did not know the man, Mohammed Saleem, an 82-year-old grandfather of 22 who was walking home from evening prayers at a local mosque. Mr. Lapshyn, who pleaded guilty to murder and other charges in the case this week and is expected to be sentenced on Friday, has shown no remorse. “I have a racial hatred, so I have a motivation,” he told police officers who interviewed him before trial. “I would like to increase racial conflict, because they are not white and I am white.” The case has intensified the debate in Britain about the roots of racial and religious hatred and far-right violence. A young, white man, well educated and seemingly well integrated into society, acting on his own, Mr. Lapshyn fits a profile that has British counterterrorism investigators increasingly worried. “They are lone actors but often more proficient than actors who we may see at the other end of the terrorist spectrum,” Charles Farr, the director general of the Office for Security and Counterterrorism, was quoted as saying in The Times of London. Lone wolves driven by an indiscriminate hatred of immigrants and in particular of Muslims can manage to stay under the radar more easily than members of militant cells can, investigators say. The tracking of far-right extremists intensified in Britain in 2010 after the police arrested one man who had more than 30 guns and about 50 explosive devices in his house, and another who ran a white-supremacist Web site and made the poison ricin. When a Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik, killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, surveillance of the far right was stepped up again. Where Mr. Lapshyn comes from, the industrial heartland of Ukraine, neo-Nazis and skinheads are known to attack ethnic Russians and Jews, and sometimes Roma. But Mr. Lapshyn took a special interest in Muslims. On Monday, the court heard how Mr. Lapshyn, after killing Mr. Saleem on April 29, had begun building hydrogen peroxide-based explosives, following instructions he had found on the Internet, and how he had singled out mosques as targets. He put his first bomb into a children’s lunchbox, took it on a bus — a moment recorded on security video — and left it outside a mosque in Walsall, an industrial town northwest of Birmingham. The bomb went off but did not hurt anyone. A week later he tried again in Wolverhampton, west of Walsall, and once again the device detonated without harming anyone. His third attempt, on July 12, accelerated the investigation by the police and eventually led to his arrest. This time, Mr. Lapshyn built a much more deadly device, packed with more than a pound of nails, and planted it at a mosque in Tipton, about halfway between Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Its timer was set for 1 p.m., when the mosque would normally be crowded with worshipers, but the start time for Friday Prayer happened to be an hour later than usual that week. When the bomb detonated, it sent the nails shooting as high as 230 feet; some were found afterward deeply embedded in trees. If the worshipers had been there at the usual time, many would have been killed or maimed, investigators said. As it was, there were no casualties. Mr. Lapshyn was eventually identified from video images and confessed to the bombings and the killing of Mr. Saleem. “Our dad was targeted simply because of his faith,” said one of Mr. Saleem’s daughters, Shazia Khan. “His beard and his clothing represented who he was. Pavlo chose to kill him that night with only the intention in mind. Hopefully, he will get the sentence he deserves.” |