London police are tracking down on Friday the man suspected of having attacked a woman and her two daughters with a chemical substance on Wednesday evening in London, and whose asylum obtained in the United Kingdom despite a conviction raises questions.
Abdul Ezedi, a 35-year-old man living in the Newcastle area (north-east of England), is suspected of having sprayed a 31-year-old woman and her two daughters aged eight and three with an “
alkaline” substance.
»
(like soda or bleach) in the middle of the street Wednesday evening around 7:30 p.m.
A few hours after this attack which took place in Clapham, in the south of the British capital, the suspect was spotted on CCTV images of a supermarket in the north of the city, with severe injuries on the right side of the face caused by this product.
According to British media, Abdul Ezedi, who is believed to have arrived from Afghanistan in 2016, was previously convicted in 2018 of a sexual offense and given a suspended sentence by Newcastle Crown Court.
According to the same source, he was granted asylum in the United Kingdom after two failures, after a priest told British authorities that Ezedi had converted to Christianity.
Several Conservative Party MPs urged the government to further tighten reception conditions on British soil, and to carry out
“a thorough examination”
of the suspect’s file.
Lives “not in danger”
The three victims were still hospitalized Friday.
The day before, the police had indicated that their lives were
“not in danger”
, but that their injuries would mark them
“forever”
.
Police Chief Mark Rowley, who insisted on Thursday that he
would “hunt down”
this attacker, ruled out at this stage the hypothesis of a terrorist attack, explaining that the man and the woman knew each other.
Nine people - four passers-by and five police officers - were also injured by this substance when they helped the victims, and eight of them were taken to hospital.
After a series of attacks involving corrosive substances which shocked the United Kingdom a few years ago, reaching the number of 941 in 2017, these incidents have become rarer thanks to tightened controls on the sale of these products in 2019 The number of attacks, however, started to rise again in 2022, increasing by 69% in England and Wales with 710 attacks according to the organization Acid Survivors Trust International.