A Stabbing in Suburbia

A man is dead, and a nation is seething. The blood-curdling murder on Monday night of Wayne Broadhurst, who stepped out at 5pm to walk his dog and never returned home, has left his neighbours along with millions of his countrymen wondering ‘what if?’. What if they had turned a corner as Broadhurst did, only to have a knifeman rain blow after blow down upon them. The killing in Uxbridge, a suburban town in the western reaches of Greater London, speaks to fears that run wide and deep.

Broadhurst was 49. He was a bin man. He was well known in the community. Two days ago, he was living a normal life. Now he’s gone. The suspect is a 22-year-old Afghan national. From what we know, the attack was utterly senseless. The Afghan was chasing a 45-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy when Broadhurst tried to intervene. For that act of instinctual courage, he lost his life. The 45-year-old, meanwhile, has sustained ‘life-changing’ injuries. The boy got off more lightly. Residents believe the alleged killer had been lodging with the 45-year-old, when he chased his landlord out on to the street. He was tasered at the scene, before being carted off by police.

It was senseless, too, in that it almost certainly could have been avoided. While there is much we do not know, while the law demands we still use ‘suspect’ and ‘alleged’ when describing the killer and the crime, we cannot help but notice that it appears to fit an awful pattern. The suspect entered the country illegally, in a lorry, in 2020. Two years later, he was granted asylum and leave to remain. The horror in Uxbridge comes after a long line of murders, terror attacks and rapes committed by those who in any sane nation would never have been here.

There’s Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, who plunged a knife into the heart of aspiring Royal Marine Thomas Roberts, outside a Subway in Bournemouth on 12 March 2022. Abdulrahimzai also came here illegally, also from Afghanistan, fleeing murder charges in Serbia. There’s Ahmed Alid, the Moroccan asylum seeker in Hartlepool, who was so inspired by Hamas’s exploits on 7 October 2023 that he stabbed his Iranian housemate before murdering a 70-year-old British man on the street. There’s Abdul Ezedi, another Afghan, who was granted asylum on his third request, despite racking up two sexual offences here. He threw alkali on a refugee woman and her children on 31 January 2024, before going on the run and killing himself.