Welcome mat for a multiple murderer

HAVE you heard the one about the Afghan murderer who pretended he was 14?

That's right, the one who was placed in a British school and terrorised teenage girls into sending him nude pictures of themselves, and wound up stabbing a would-be Royal Marine through the heart after a 4am brawl about an e-scooter.

It's a tale for the age. Upon arriving in the United Kingdom at the age of 18 after a brief tour of the continent including stops in Italy, where he was convicted for drug dealing, and Serbia, where he carried out a double murder and was convicted in his absence, Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai claimed he had just entered his teenage years. Guidance at the time stated that should an arrival look anything under 25 they should be given the benefit of the doubt.

To put that in perspective: I am in my early 30s and still have my ID checked occasionally when buying booze due to 'Challenge 25', the rule that if someone looks under 25 they have to prove their age. Naturally each request flatters me, but it shows you how perverse the notion is. Going by Border Force's standards I could get away with claiming I am less than half my age.

Becoming totally assimilated into British youth culture, our young 'asylum seeker' soon adopted the neo-indigenous habit of glorifying bladed weaponry, lurking around town centres hood up and face covered, and getting into fights. The timid teen was thrown out of his foster carer's home after threatening to headbutt her in the face.

An attempt to verify his age was eventually made more than two years after his arrival and a month before he murdered 21-year-old Thomas Roberts outside a Subway shop in Bournemouth. It was the tragic culmination of officialdom's pusillanimity.

Society's gutlessness reaches new heights each day. Plain fact is an unspeakable heresy in the mouths of those who govern: our politicians can neither confirm nor deny the existence of biological women, gangs of sexual predators are left undisturbed lest someone be called a nasty word, we are driven into socially suicidal schemes such as Net Zero without even a pretence of debate.

The Afghan murderer, now 21, who is due to be sentenced at Salisbury crown court today, claimed to have been mentally damaged by what happened in his youth. He said his family were murdered by the Taliban and that he had been tortured. I have no idea if the claims are genuine or not, but Lord knows what misery exists in that benighted land. Not that this is an excuse: if I had it my way the man would hang.

Yet for much of the tragedy in that country the British government is regrettably responsible. Decades of inept and objectiveless war-waging have left a trail of chaos and dead bodies for precisely zero benefit to us and the peoples we were supposedly trying to 'free'.

The mad schemes of our politicians have led to systemic failures across the board. At each level, the British people have been let down, and others across the world have been victim of the malign narcissism of those in power. We are poorer, less safe and less free after decades of supposed economic growth and technological advancement. Politicians dangled the shiny bauble of GDP growth in front of us while the rest of society atrophied.

From a protracted war with no viable purpose to the failings of our borders, and the inability of government to process, track and deal with illegal arrivals, the story of this particular Afghan is an indictment of so much that has gone wrong with our country. No doubt we will soon hear that 'lessons will be learnt' along with the usual boilerplate that 'things will change'.

However, we all know by now that they won't. Not for the better, anyway.