Author:
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: December 20, 2002
URL: http://www.rediff.com/us/2002/dec/20uk.htm
Three Asian youths hailing from
Pakistan have been sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of murder
of a white teenager in Peterborough, England, soon after the September
11 attacks in the US.
The three, Ahmed Ali Awan (21),
Shaied Nazir (22) and Sarfraz Ali (25) pounced on Ross Parker (17) as he
walked with his girl friend Nicola Toms, along a dim cycleway in Peterborough
after finishing work, and attacked him with a chemical spray, a hammer
and foot-long hunting knife.
The attackers told Toms to flee
as it was against their "code of honour" to harm a woman.
After Ross Parker had been beaten
with a hammer and fatally stabbed, one of his attackers held up a bloodied
knife and said: "Look at this -- cherish the blood."
The five-week trial at Northampton
Crown Court had heard that Awan, managing director of a labour contracting
firm, stabbed Parker to show his "superiority" over others in the gang.
Sentencing the three men to life,
Sir Edwin Jowett, sitting as a deputy high court judge, said: "You put
your heads together with the purpose of arming yourselves and of attacking
an innocent man you might find by chance simply because he was of a different
race to yourselves. A racist killing must be one of the gravest kinds of
killing."
Nazir, nicknamed Biggy, was a door-to-door
sales representative for a power company. He admitted being present when
Ross was attacked. He said he had kicked him a couple of times and had
tried to spray the chemical spray gas but had ended up spraying himself.
He denied being party to any plan to kill.