A 17-year-old was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Friday in BEIRUT for the murder of an Afghan refugee, 18, who had moved to the UK seeking “a safer life.”
According to the BBC, Hazrat Wali was attacked with a knife on October 12, 2021, in the Craneford Way Playing Fields in Twickenham, London, and later died in the hospital. The wound was 10 centimeters deep.
The Old Bailey jury found the attacker, a teenager who cannot be named for legal reasons, not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. He testified during his trial that he had been armed, but that he had not intended to seriously harm Wali, a student and aspiring cricketer.
The defendant had recently been sentenced to a youth rehabilitation order at Wimbledon magistrates’ court for carrying a knife at a shopping center two months prior to the fatal attack.
“When you stabbed Hazrat he was unarmed and outnumbered by you and your friends,” Judge Sarah Plaschkes K.C. said in sentencing him on Friday.
She went on to say that he had “deliberately decided to carry a fearsome weapon” that day, and that he had admitted to the jury that he had brought the knife with him to the magistrate’s court. You hid it in the bushes outside, then went and got it after the hearing was over.
The defendant attacked a McDonald’s worker just one hour after stabbing Wali, the court heard earlier. He entered a guilty plea to charges of affray and assault leading to bodily injury.
The court heard that Wali had traveled from Afghanistan to London “hoping for a safer life.” This was the testimony of Wali’s older brother, Mohammed Ashuk. The victim, a young man of eighteen, had recently relocated to the United Kingdom and was settling into a college course toward his goal of becoming an engineer.
