London police have been searching for him since an attack that shocked the United Kingdom.
Last Wednesday, a woman and her two daughters were sprayed in the street in London with an “alkaline” chemical substance (like soda or bleach).
The victims are still hospitalized.
And although their lives are not in danger, their injuries will mark them “forever”, Scotland Yard said.
Police suspect Abdul Ezedi, a 35-year-old man living in the Newcastle area (northeast of England) of being the perpetrator of this attack.
A few hours after the events 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.
A repeat offender suspect
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 conduct “a thorough examination” of the suspect’s file.
Also read: Nine people injured after being sprayed with a “corrosive substance” in London
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 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, numbering 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, increased again in 2022, increasing by 69% in England and Wales with 710 attacks according to the organization Acid Survivors Trust International.