Afghan double murderer tried to break into my bedroom at night, teen recalls trends now

The call every parent dreads came at six in the morning. Dolores Wallace, still half asleep, picked up the phone and held it to her ear.

At first it was hard to comprehend what the voice on the other end was telling her. Her son Tommy had been stabbed, she needed to come to the hospital.

‘They said I needed to get there quickly,’ she says in an exclusive interview with the Mail, recalling the moment life twisted on its axis and plunged her and her family into unfathomable tragedy. ‘I was in shock, numb, but I got in the car and drove.’

At Poole Hospital in Dorset, surgeons were battling to save the life of her 21-year-old son, Thomas Roberts, who earlier that night had been stabbed twice in quick succession by Afghan migrant Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai after stepping in to calm a petty row over an e-scooter.

Doctors told Dolores they were trying to find the source of the bleeding so that they could stop it. But the next time the door to the visitors’ room opened, she was told that her beloved son, a former sea scout who loved sailing and had just finishing filling out application forms to join the Royal Marines, was dead.

‘I couldn’t take it in,’ she says. ‘I was shouting because I thought that they’d given up on him. I just wanted them to get him back. I couldn’t believe Tommy was gone.’

This was no tragic, fateful placing of an innocent person in the wrong place at the wrong time, nor was it an isolated incident. Abdulrahimzai, we now know, should not have been in Britain and wouldn’t have been if proper checks had taken place.

He’d already killed twice before that night, gunning down two fellow Afghan migrants with a Kalashnikov rifle in Serbia in 2018 where, the Mail discovered this week, far from being a dispossessed victim of atrocity seeking sanctuary, he worked as a people smuggler while zig-zagging his way around Europe.

In fact, it was a turf war with a rival smuggling gang which led to the murders.

This week — at the end of his three-week trial at Salisbury Crown Court — he was also found guilty of murdering Thomas in March last year and sentenced to life in jail.

But his case has raised disturbing and urgent questions about how he slipped into the UK undetected after pretending to be a 14-year-old orphan when he stepped off a cross-channel ferry in Poole in December 2019. In reality, he was at least 18.

After listening to his sob story about fleeing the Taliban, border forces and the Home Office failed to check the hardened killer’s fingerprints against international police databases, taking at face value his claim to be a child. Had authorities made proper checks, they would have discovered that Abdulrahimzai had already been denied entry to Norway and Italy and that he was already wanted in Serbia where, in his absence, he was later found guilty of murder.

He was swiftly placed with a foster family and gained a place at a secondary school where, dressed in uniform, he mixed with children as young as 11.

Piling blunder upon blunder, there were further missed opportunities to stop Abdulrahimzai after police and social services were warned about him on multiple occasions by those who saw him carrying a knife or a machete. Even after he was removed from care after threatening his foster mother, he was simply moved on to new taxpayer-funded accommodation.

Indeed, the Mail can also reveal that three months before he stabbed Thomas in Bournemouth, Abdulrahimzai had terrorised and threatened to stab a 16-year-old girl in the town while living in the same residential care home. More, later, of her terrifying ordeal at his hands.

‘If someone had done their job properly all of this could have been prevented,’ says Dolores. ‘Tommy would still be alive today. It’s just so unfair that this happened to my boy. He was so kind and caring. He never hurt anybody. It’s such a waste of a precious life.’

Her husband Peter, who was stepfather to Tommy for 20 years, adds: ‘When you lose your son it’s like losing a part of you. Your whole life is built around those moments with your children.’

He cannot understand how Abdulrahimzai was allowed into the country in the first place.

‘They let him in with no checks whatsoever. I have been checked more when signing up to a gym or going abroad on holiday. ‘The system has let us down. I’m not against asylum seekers, I understand some of these people have nowhere else to go. But the right checks have to be in place so that this doesn’t happen again.’

British authorities have now determined that Abdulrahimzai is at least 21, meaning he would have already been 18 when he got off the ferry which brought him from Cherbourg to Poole on Boxing Day in 2019.

But investigations by the Mail in Serbia this week suggest that he may even be older than that. Among documents held by authorities is a copy of an ID card giving his year of birth as 2000.

During his trial at Salisbury Crown Court, Abdulrahimzai claimed that the Taliban killed his parents when he was a young boy and that he himself had been tortured as a teenager. He left Afghanistan via Pakistan in October 2015 and headed for Europe. For the next three years, he flitted between Italy, Norway and Serbia where — unlike the UK — authorities took his fingerprints.

Speaking exclusively to the Mail this week, the Serbian judge who tried Abdulrahimzai for murder in his absence in November 2020 said there was no question that the Afghan worked as a people smuggler charging refugees 2000 euros a head to get from Serbia into western Europe.

Marica Jolic, the deputy president of Sremska Mitrovica high court, said: ‘It was a small operation. There were three of them. But another group were trying to take their business so they killed them.’

The July 2018 murders took place in a derelict wooden house in a watermelon field on the edge of the village of Dobrinci, close to a service station on the busy E-70 motorway. It was a popular spot for migrants who used it as a base while waiting to board lorries crossing the border into Croatia on the way

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