The SHOCKING Story of Thomas Roberts

And what it reveals about our broken system

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Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 54,200 subscribers from 167 countries around the world and thousands of paying supporters who support our work. Like our stuff? Then help us expand by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.

Tommy Roberts with girlfriend Gemma Walker (Image: Gemma Walker)

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In the early hours of March 12, 2022, Thomas Roberts, a 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine, was stabbed twice in the chest. One incursion sliced through his heart and he was soon dead.

The man who murdered him in cold blood was Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai —an Afghan asylum seeker who had illegally entered Britain a few years earlier. 

Thomas Roberts will never fulfil his dream to serve his nation. He will never grow up to start a family, or drink another pint with his friends. He will never see his parents again, or laugh, or cry, or love. 

And while the blame for the tragedy of Thomas Roberts’ murder lies with Abdulrahimzai, he is not the only person with blood on his hands. 

Why do I want to write about this case? Because at every stage the British state and the elite class, through their policy of open borders and a series of truly shocking failures, let Thomas Roberts and his family down. And somebody needs to call this out.

This week, Rachael Griffin, a coroner in Dorset ruled that a full inquest into the circumstances surrounding Roberts’s death was not required, thereby sparing the Home Office from proper scrutiny. 

While Griffin admitted there had been “individual errors” from the State, she said, quite unbelievably, they “do not amount to a systemic failure”.

If the following series of events is not systemic failure, then I do not know what is.

This is the appalling story of how Thomas Roberts’ attacker, who had already murdered two people in Europe, gained entry to Britain, and how the authorities failed at every stage to do their basic duty: to protect the British people. 

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The first failure of the British state occurred on Boxing Day in 2019, when Abdulrahimzai smuggled himself in a vehicle on a ferry from Cherbourg. 

As soon as Abdulrahimzai entered Britain illegally he should have been detained and deported. 

Instead, he told Home Office officials he was a 14-year-old from Afghanistan and they simply believed him. 

No age assessment was carried out, and the authorities sent Abdulrahimzai to a secondary school in Dorset. 

But who is Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai? 

If the state had been more curious as to who they were sending to study alongside Year 9 pupils, they would have found out that Abdulrahimzai was not 14, but 19. 

A few weeks after his entry into Britain his fingerprints were taken, and it was discovered he had links to Norway and Italy, but no further inquiries were made.

If they had been, the Home Office would have found out that he was lying about his age, and if the British state had really been thorough they would have found out something even more damning: Abdulrahimzai had already murdered two people just eighteen months before. 

At the end of July 2018, the illegal migrant teenager shot two Afghan men where a group of refugees and migrants were staying in a shed in Serbia. 

But it was too late, and the brutal murderer was now sitting alongside young English teenagers studying for their GCSEs. 

Abdulrahimzai was also given foster care, and in January 2020 his foster parent reported that a dentist had raised concerns that the migrant was lying about his age, but the Home Office still did not do an age assessment. 

Abdulrahimzai was kicked out of his first school within months of his arrival in December 2020 after various concerns were raised that he was carrying knives. 

It was even alleged that he had chased a student with a knife, which he denied. 

A few months before Abdulrahimzai murdered Roberts he would post images of himself on TikTok with ten-inch blade knives, which he said he uploaded to gain followers. 

At his second school in Dorset he assaulted another pupil, resulting in injury. 

At around the same time the illegal migrant assaulted his foster mother, who had unwittingly volunteered to host a murderer in her house. 

The foster mother said that Abdulrahimzai was spoken to by the police while he was in her care for carrying knives, which she says he believed he could carry to defend himself. 

Then in January 2022, the British state finally began to act.

It was decided an age assessment would be carried out, two years after the Afghan had smuggled himself into the country. 

The decision had been made because Abdulrahimzai was refusing to attend school and was bringing women back to his accommodation. 

The last chance the British state had to save Roberts from his murder occurred on 10 March 2022, less than two days before the stabbing. 

The police received a call about Abdulrahimzai carrying a machete, but they failed to take further action after they were unable to gain access to his residence as the front gate was locked. 

By now it was 12 March and Roberts’ fate was sealed. After a drunken night out Roberts’s friend decided to take an e-scooter home, which angered Abdulrahimzai who got into an argument with Roberts. Within 30 seconds the young aspiring marine was dead. 

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Tribute on Old Christchurch Road. Source: Catherine Clarke

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It was only after his death, and Abdulrahimzai’s third murder, that the Afghan’s fingerprints were shared with Interpol, which revealed in September 2022 that he was on the run from a double homicide in Serbia. 

A young Brit was murdered, several school children were terrorised, and an innocent foster mother who was trying her best to help a man she believed was a child whose parents had been killed by the Taliban was assaulted. All because the British state failed to keep them safe. 

The words of Roberts’ family are equally devastating as they are concerning. 

Peter Wallace, his step-father, said: “There were so many warning signs that he should not be here yet the Home Office did nothing about it.”

“We will never be able to bring Tommy back but they still let in thousands of people without proper checks and this will keep happening.”

Meanwhile Roberts’ mother, Dolores, slammed the Border Force, the Home Office, Dorset Police and Bournemouth Council for failing her son. 

“Everything is wrong in this country and it will continue to happen again,” she said. 

The immigration debate can sometimes seem abstract. Discussions can focus on macroeconomic data around GDP, or vague notions of “cultural enhancement”. 

London liberals like Sadiq Khan laud the Notting Hill Carnival as a great example of how immigration has benefited Britain while downplaying the two murders that resulted from the festival, a series of stabbings and injured police officers.

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However, mass migration, both legal and illegal, is not an abstract issue. It has real world consequences. It directly led to the murder of not just Thomas Roberts, but countless others who have been killed by immigrants, both legal and illegal.

And it led to the rape and sexual abuse of thousands of young white English girls, which yet another court case in Rotherham this week, which saw many Muslim men sentenced after abusing two young girls, once again underlines.

Consistently, what evidence we have from places like Germany, Sweden, and Denmark shows that illegal and legal migrants are disproportionately more likely to commit these kinds of hideous crimes.

In the UK, however, the establishment and the state simply refuse to collect or even publish what little data they have on crime by nationality and immigration status, so we don’t really know what is going on in the country.

As I wrote last week, the elite class blame the masses for “misinformation” while consistently refusing to make this basic information available to them. If the elite class is confident that this radical political experiment is not putting many British people at disproportionate risk then why don’t they just release the data?

For all of the “cultural enrichment” we supposedly gain from having access to more foreign restaurants and diversity festivals, it is young innocent English men like Thomas Roberts who end up being sacrificed on the altar of liberal progressivism.

I don’t think anybody who is part of this Substack community would have a problem with a small amount of legal immigration that is properly controlled and contributes to our national economy and society —myself included.

But I do think all of us share a deep unease and instinctive opposition to the kind of mass, illegal and uncontrolled immigration that is now flowing through Western states, ushering in outsiders who have completely different values, ways of life, and attitudes and who often seem to hate who we are.

Any serious government, any serious and decent society which cares for its citizens, would have launched a full scale public inquiry into the death of Thomas Roberts.

The name of Thomas Roberts would be known just as widely as the names George Floyd and Stephen Lawrence.

But it is not, hence why I am writing about Thomas Roberts with no paywall. I want people to know about this case. And I want you to tell others about this case.

Because the blunt reality is that Thomas Roberts is an inconvenience for the British establishment, who will not be held accountable for their part in allowing his murderer to enter the country. 

I hope there will be no other cases like Thomas Roberts’. But the fact of the matter is that since 2018 more than 135,000 illegal migrants have entered Britain to join some 1.2 million who are already in the country, many of whom we know nothing about. 

Mass migration is not inevitable, but I fear another case like Thomas Roberts’ is. 

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Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 54,200 subscribers from 167 countries around the world and thousands of paying supporters who support our work. Like our stuff? Then help us expand by becoming a paid supporter and access everything —the full archive, exclusive posts, polling, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent writers who are not afraid to push back against the grain. You can also join our community on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook.

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