Written by Dr Mohammed Ilyas   

Today Pavlo Lapshyn, the Ukrainian student accused of murdering 82-year-old grandfather Mohammed Saleem from Birmingham pleaded guilty at the Old Baily. Media outlets have reported that the 25-year-old had a deep hatred for 'non-whites', he was a ‘lone-wolf’ and inspired by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. The hatred was such that it drove him to carry out a campaign of violence targeting ‘non-whites’. His most audacious plan was to kill Muslims by planting a ‘1 kilo nail bomb’ in a Mosque in Tipton, Birmingham. If successful, the bomb would have killed and injured many worshipers.

If Lapshyn had succeeded, he would have replicated David Copeland's 1999 ‘nail bomb’ attacks on ethnic minorities and gay people in London, which left 3 people dead and injuring over a hundred people.

Motivation

Police interviews and court transcripts revealed that Lapshyn had no remorse for the carnage that he wanted to unleash on his victims. When he was asked about the murder of Mr Saleem he said -'I have a racial hatred, so I have a motivation. 'I have a racial motivation and a hatred.' When asked if he had set off the bombs he said 'yes' and when asked why, he added -'I wanted to increase racist conflict.' When he was asked why he targeted mosques in the West Midlands he added -'Because they are not white and I am white.' He went on to boast that he wanted to set off a 'series of explosions', hinting that he had planned to target many more. Lapshyn’s views clearly demonstrate someone who was on a ‘mission to kill and maim as many non whites’.

From the transcripts it clear that he had been well advised by his lawyers to use language that expresses racial rather than religious hatred. Despite the ‘non-white’ hate claim, it is clear that by ‘non-white’ Lapshyn meant ‘Muslims’ because all of his targets were places of Muslim worship. However, by using the language of ‘racial hate’, the lawyers and the media are detracting attention away from the growing and increasingly violent phenomenon of Islamophobia.

Radicalization

A search of Lapshyn’s computer revealed an archive of white American supremacist literature and documents from authors such as William Luther Pierce. Like the case of Anders Breivik the ‘literature trail’ leads back to the United States of America, suggesting that American authors are important in the radicalization process of white European right wing extremists. It is not clear ‘why and how’ Lapshyn started to hate ‘Muslims’. Ukraine has a very small Muslim population, which has been in the country since the 12 century. In most cases it is indistinguishable from the non-Muslim population.

The case raises questions around ‘why and how’ Lapshyn was radicalized – Was he vicariously radicalized by the media, was it right wing politicians, was it Christian hate preachers, or was it local and international hate preachers. Anton Shekhovtsov, a Ukrainian expert on right wing groups said that ‘in late May Lapshyn added extremist material to his social media page hosted on a Russian-language site’. Shekhovtsov further added that ‘extremist material started to appear on Lapshyn's social media pages after he murdered Saleem. The extremist groups he cites are Russian in origin: ‘Before Birmingham, there is no evidence of rightwing material on his website’.

New episode in ‘violence directed at Muslims’

Although Muslims in Europe are familiar with racial and Islamophobic violence, but the Murder of Mohammed Saleem could be a start of a ‘new’ episode of ‘violence directed at Muslims’ because the murderer was from mainland Europe and seems to have came to the UK to kill and maim British Muslims in order to engender ‘racial-religious war’.

The case of Lapshyn raises a number of issues, such as –Why was he not picked up earlier by the authorities, should Europeans entering the UK be vetted for ‘extremism’, is the UK becoming the desired destination for right wing extremists because of its ‘open borders’ and Muslim population, and are there sleeper cells made up of foreign and home-grown right wing extremists in the UK.