It’s all too easy to blame Brexit for final week’s horrific assault in Croydon (Report,3 April) that has left a teenage Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker fighting for his life, but problems in this London borough are more longstanding.
In July 1992, and Ruhullah Aramesh,an Afghan refugee living in the Thornton Heath area of the borough, was beaten to death in a racist attack by six white youths armed with iron bars and lumps of wood. Many other racist assaults occurred there during that decade. In 2011 a women was filmed delivering a racist rant against black people and Poles on the Croydon tram. In January 2014 the English Defence League began targeting an Islamic community centre in Croydon as an “illegal mosque”. In June 2015 a woman had her hijab violently pulled off in a Croydon street. In October that year there was a high-profile immigration raid on Croydon works premises which resulted in seven arrests. Six of those arrested were transferred to detention centres pending their deportation.
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Source: theguardian.com