Pavlo Lapshyn was jailed for a minimum of 40 years in 2013 after mounting his campaign of terror across the West Midlands.
And today, West Midlands Police counter-terror officers released new images of him carrying out practice explosions in the Ukraine. The footage was found on his laptop and show him carrying out a range of test blasts in forests.
The new images were released today as part of a West Midlands Police drive to tweet live from its counter-terror offices.
Remains of the nail bomb that Pavlo Lapshyn planted outside the Kanz-ul-Iman Central Jamia Mosque in Tipton
Pavlo Lapshyn had been in Britain for just five days when he murdered grandfather of 23 Mohammed Saleem by stabbing him in the back as he made his way home after Friday prayers. The 25 year-old white supremacist had moved to Birmingham where he had been awarded a placement to further his engineering studies.
Following his trial counter terrorism officers said that he had acted as a “lone wolf”. But detectives found literature and images related to PoU [the neo-Nazi paramilitary group, Patriot of Ukraine] and fascist Dynamo Kiev supporters on Lapshyn’s Russian Facebook page and on a pen computer drive when they raided the home he shared with a fellow student in Small Heath, Birmingham.
Investigations by counter terrorism officers found that Lapshyn was not a member of any of these groups and that no one else was involved in the murder of Mr Saleem, aged 82, or the bombs that were set off at three Midland mosques.
But Lapshyn was influenced by the ideologies of right wing extremists in Ukraine. Neo-Nazi literature and racist chants popular with Dynamo Kiev fans were among the disturbing set of literature found at his home in Small Heath, Birmingham.
Detectives also found a folder marked “White World” on Lapshyn’s computer which included a violent video game called “Ethnic Cleansing” featuring ‘soldiers’ from the PoU. Another audio file entitled “You Must Murder” contained more racist rants by East European extremists calling for a violent race war.
Not according to most of the UK media, Steve Rose writes.
Remains of the nail bomb that Pavlo Lapshyn planted outside the Kanz-ul-Iman Central Jamia Mosque in Tipton
A white supremacist terrorist who admitted murdering a Muslim pensioner and plotting three explosives devices at mosques in the West Midlands has sentenced to life in jail.
Pavlo Lapshyn, 25, admitted to stabbing grandfather Mohammed Saleem as he returned home from evening prayers in Small Heath, Birmingham on 29 April. He also pleaded guilty to planting three explosive devices near mosques in Walsall, Wolverhampton and Tipton.
Lapshyn from the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, was sentenced to a minimum of 40 years in prison at the Old Bailey. As well as murder, he was also sentenced to 12 years for offences under the Explosives Substances Act and 12 years for offences under the Terrorism Act, all to run concurrently.
The prosecution pushed for Lapshyn to receive a whole-life tariff, meaning he would never be able to apply for parole.
A gifted student has pleaded guilty to a campaign of terrorist attacks in the Midlands in which he stabbed to death a Muslim grandfather and staged bomb attacks against mosques in an attempt to murder and maim worshippers.
Pavlo Lapshyn, 25, a Ukrainian, admitted to police that he hated anyone who was not white and that he wanted to carry out a series of violent attacks to convulse community relations in Britain and start a race war.
His campaign started in April 2013, five days after his arrival from Ukraine, where he had won a prize to study engineering and gain work experience in the UK. When the PhD student was arrested in July, hours before it was feared he could strike again, police found three partially assembled bombs in his Birmingham flat.
Representatives of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars and the Crimean Muftiate (the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Crimea) are shocked by recent attacks on mosques in Crimea and are demanding that the law enforcement agencies take decisive measures to uncover these crimes.
“The circumstances around the death of Kateryna Korin, a 19-year-old Ukrainian student on the Crimean peninsula, appeared to point to a made-for-tabloid tragedy: a young beauty-pageant contestant brutally killed by her admirer, a radical Islamist who chose to stone her to death under an unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law. There was just one small problem: They weren’t true.”
Farangis Najibullah reports on press coverage of the “Muslim girl stoned to death under Sharia law” – as the Daily Mail put it, with characteristic disregard for the facts.
A teenage Muslim girl was stoned to death under “Sharia law” after taking part in a beauty contest in Ukraine. Katya Koren, 19, was found dead in a village in the Crimea region near her home. Friends said she liked wearing fashionable clothes and had come seventh in a beauty contest.
Her battered body was buried in a forest and was found a week after she disappeared. Police have opened a murder investigation and are looking into claims that three Muslim youths killed her, claiming her death was justified under Islam.
One of the three – named as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev – is under arrest and told police that Katya had “violated the laws of Sharia”. Gaziev has said he has no regrets about her death.
Of course the article was immediately seized on by the English Defence League:
If you can stomach it, you can read the comments by EDL supporters here.
And the article provoked the usual succession of bigots into posting anti-Muslim comments on the Mail‘s own website:
“Would be nice to see some supporters of this faith speaking out against this all too common occurance.”
“In a recent demonstration by Muslims against the English, did I not see banners proclaiming ‘Sharia for Britain’.”
“How long before some idiot starts bleating about ‘Islamaphobia’ with reference to this news story? Im suffering from Islamaphobia myself I have a distinct aversion to young girls being brutaly murdered in the name of religion by cowards!”
“I wish apologists for the misogyny of ‘Islam’ would see how despicable their Sharia law is.”
“Another victim of the mysoginistic murder cult that is sharia law.”
“Where are the voices of ‘moderate’ Islam now? I can’t hear them, can you? Can anyone?”
“what a lovely religion NOT”
“Absolutely hideous! I am appalled that such behaviour is deemed justifiable under a law written over a 1000 years ago by uneducated warring idiots!”
“I hope the Archbishop of Canterbury is reading this he is rather a fan of sharia law as I recall, just shows how out of touch he is.”
However, there are several rather more informed comments that suggest the Mail‘s story of Sharia-inspired stoning is completely fabricated. For example:
“Daily Mail, stop lying and instigating hatred for Muslims! The original Russian article from Komsomolskaya Pravda of 28/05 does not mention any religious motives in this murder (I can provide the link to the original story). Katya wasn’t a Muslim. Katya Koren is not a Muslim name. There was no ‘three Muslim teenagers’ who ‘stones Katya’. there was just one mentally distrurbed boy of Muslim origin who hit her on the head once. He doesn’t know himself why he did it. People suspect because Katya rejected him. This has absolutely nothing to do with sharia, Muslims, religion etc. Who is making up such stories? You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
And: “The story is completely inacurrate. Katya Koren was a Ukrainian girl and she was an Orthdox Christian. That was not a stoning, but a cold-blooded murder by a psycho who happened to be from a mixed Ukranian-Tatar family. I am amazed, how things can be distorted.”
And: “This news, made by Russian propaganda apparatus, is provocation. Because the killer even has no any attitude to Islam. Katya is Russian, not Muslim. Boy is Slavic, but is adopted by Muslims. Ukrainian Internal Affairs Ministry Crimean Branch Press Chairperson Olga Bogoslavskaya said that murder is not motivated by religious belief. All world copied your news! Who will excuse?”
Also: “THE KEY FACTS: 1. Katya is an Orthodox Christian. 2. Bilyal is formally Muslim, just adopted by Muslim man 3. Bilyal is not religious, like his father, even didn’t go to mosque. 4. Murder is not done by stoning. 5. Internal Affairs Dep. announced that murder has no religious roots. 6. Such a news first appeared in pro-Russian media.”
See also “Katya Koren: Ukrainian beauty queen killed by disturbed classmate not Sharia law”, LoonWatch, 31 May 2011
Update: The Mail has an new article on the case headlined “Was Muslim girl ‘stoned to death for taking part in beauty pageant’ actually murdered by a stalker?” Perhaps that’s a question the Mailshould have asked before it published the original inflammatory article. And the paper is still banging on about how “Sharia law prohibits women from taking part in beauty contests” – which, even if it were true, would hardly apply to Katya Koren, who wasn’t a Muslim.
“… burqas and niqabs should be banned in all public spaces because they present a security risk. Anyone might lurk under those shrouds – female or male, Muslim or non-Muslim, decent citizen or criminal – with who knows what evil purposes….
“Expressing the universal fear aroused by these garments, a recent Pakistani horror film, Zibahkhana (meaning ‘slaughterhouse’ in Urdu) includes a sadistic cannibalistic killer figure dubbed ‘Burqa Man’…. The time has come everywhere to ban from public places these hideous, unhealthy, socially divisive, terrorist-enabling and criminal-friendly garments.”
Daniel Pipes in the Jerusalem Post, 1 August 2007
The Welsh-based former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey says Muslim women, particularly teachers, should not be permitted to wear the veil in the workplace. The 70-year-old former head of the Church of England who now has a home in Llanrhidian, Gower, was speaking ahead of a lecture he will give at Swansea University next week.
“The face is an important medium of communication,” he said. “We all need to see a full face, to see the smile and hear the voice clearly. Obviously, wearing of the veil is not central to Islam otherwise every Muslim woman would be compelled to adopt that kind of dress.”