On Friday 20th May – just two days before the third anniversary of the terrorist attack that saw UK soldier Lee Rigby stabbed and hacked to death on London streets – a man named Ethem Aydin Orhon stabbed multiple women in a supermarket car park just 15 miles away.
Mr Orhon was caught by police and remanded in custody until he appeared in front of Wimbledon Magistrates Court the next day. He is now being held until trial on June 17th, when he’ll be charged with four counts of attempted murder and one of possessing an offensive weapon.
But what you don’t see in the reporting of the Independent, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail, the Mirror, the Sun, ITV, BBC, Metro and others is the fact that one of the witnesses to the incident said the following:
“The man who did it walked off, went around onto the main road and was waving a knife around”. Sound familiar? Of course it does. But more than that, another man told the Evening Standard‘s video team: “A couple of people said he was shouting about that Lee Rigby’s birthday or something like that”.
But that detail seems to have been left out of the media record of the incident, and since Mr Orhon has now been to court, the police consider the matter sub judice and therefore won’t discuss it.
What we know however, is that four women, aged 53, 62, 67 and 71, were left injured following a stabbing on a South London street just a few days short of the anniversary of Lee Rigby’s death.
And we also know that Mr Orhon had been released from police custody just hours before his latest attack. According to one local paper, he had been arrested in a different borough the day before for being in possession of a knife and assaulting a police officer. But the police released him to attack again less 24 hours later.
A woman working at the nearby Hampton Pub said Mr Orhon “appeared to be out of it” and was targeting women in the “completely unprovoked” attack. “He only went for the women,” she said, adding: “The man ran through and started attacking them. It didn’t seem like they knew him, it was completely unprovoked.
“If it had been ten or 20 minutes earlier there would have been children there because it’s right outside a primary school.”
Cases like that of Mr Orhon rarely get much media, and we will probably never really know the man’s motives. What we do know however from speaking to locals is that the last shocking murders they remember were those perpetrated by Levi Bellfield.
Mr. Bellfield, now serving three life sentences at HM Prison Frankland, was convicted of murdering three women including 13-year-old Milly Dowler.
He now goes by the name of Yusuf Rahim, having converted during his time at HM Prison Wakefield.
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Pictures courtesy of Rachel Megawhat/Breitbart London