An Afghan asylum seeker who claimed he was 16 when he was actually 21, has been found guilty of murdering a young man in England, but it has emerged that he was also convicted in absentia of a double murder in Serbia.
Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai faces a mandatory life sentence after a jury at Salisbury Crown Court convicted him on Monday of the murder of 21-year-old Thomas Roberts in a Subway sandwich shop in the English seaside resort of Bournemouth on March 12, 2022.
After he was convicted, prosecutor Nick Lobbenberg, KC, told the court about Abdulrahimzai’s criminal past in Europe.
Lobbenberg said Abdulrahimzai was identified as the man who killed two fellow Afghan migrants with a Kalashnikov rifle in August 2018 after a dispute about people-trafficking.
He fled the country but was convicted of murder in absentia, said Lobbenberg.
Judge Paul Dugdale explained to the jury that although the murder case in Serbia was “terrifying,” he had kept it from them to prevent it prejudicing their deliberations.
Lied About Age on Arrival in England
He was born in Afghanistan and arrived in England in December 2019 as an illegal immigrant. He claimed at the time to be 14.In the run-up to his trial Abdulrahimzai could not be named because he appeared to be covered by the Children and Young Persons Act, which gives anonymity to juvenile defendants.
But in October 2022 checks were made by the court and it was determined “he was an adult born in October 2001, making him 20 at the time of offence and 18 when he entered the UK.”
The judge, Mrs. Justice Cutts, therefore lifted the reporting restrictions which prevented him from being named and also ordered he be moved from Feltham young offenders’ institution to an adult prison.
Abdulrahimzai pulled out a knife and stabbed Roberts to death after a trivial dispute with Roberts’s friend, James Medway, over an e-scooter in the Subway shop.
Killer Blamed ‘Loss of Control’
Abdulrahimzai did not deny inflicting the fatal wounds but pleaded guilty to manslaughter and denied murder on the grounds that his actions were the result of a momentary “loss of control.”Giving evidence during his trial, Abdulrahimzai claimed his parents were killed by the Taliban, who planted bombs at his family home after accusing them of collaborating with U.S. forces.
Abdulrahimzai said: “I have seen some explosions not very far away. There was an American base not far from where we lived and the Taliban would come and demand things and there would be fighting and gunshots.”
“They used heavy weapons like rocket launchers. They planted bombs around my house, I was at my uncle’s house at the time, when I came home my parents were dead. I saw their body parts and a lot of blood,” he said.
Abdulrahimzai said the Taliban tortured him for three weeks and then left him for dead and the jury was shown photographs of scars on his body which he claimed were caused by knives and rifle butts.
He said he had left Afghanistan in October 2015 and arrived in Europe via Pakistan and Iran. He spent time in Serbia and Italy and then applied for asylum in Norway.
When it was refused in December 2019, he came to England and lived in Poole, Dorset.
He will be sentenced as an adult, rather than a juvenile, and will spend his sentence in an adult prison.
In 2007 two Nigerian-born brothers who were convicted of killing a woman during a robbery at a christening party in south London had to be sentenced as juveniles because they refused to give permission for dental tests which would have indicated their true age.
Prosecutor Brian Altman, QC, said the pair had “declined” to undergo dental tests.
Mr. Justice Gross told the brothers they would have got 16 years in jail, instead of the eight years he sentenced them to, if they had been proved to be adults.
