UK jails Ukrainian over anti-Muslim attacks
Student gets minimum of 40 years in prison after admitting to killing Muslim man and planting bombs near three mosques.
A Ukranian student has been jailed for a minimum of 40 years by a British court for murdering a Muslim grandfather and planting bombs near three mosques as part of what police called a racist terror campaign.
Pavlo Lapshyn, 25, had pleaded guilty on Monday to stabbing 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem to death as he walked home from a mosque in the central English city of Birmingham in April.
Lapshyn, a postgraduate student from the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, also admitted plotting to cause explosions at mosques in three towns in central England.
No one was injured in the blasts in the towns of Walsall, Wolverhampton and Tipton in June and July.
Judge Nigel Sweeney, sitting at the Old Bailey in London, the central criminal court for England and Wales, sentenced Lapshyn to life in jail with a minimum term of 40 years on Friday.
“You clearly hold extremist right-wing, white supremacist views and you were motivated to commit the offences by religious and racial hatred in the hope that you would ignite racial conflict and cause Muslims to leave the area where you were living,” the judge said.
“Such views, hatred and motivations have no place whatsoever in our multi-faith and multi-cultural society.”