Britain's Muslim Gang Culture
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http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2973
Britain's Muslim Gang Culture
Immigration; Posted on: 2008-01-14
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Coming soon to a town near you?
Adrian Morgan
The "Muslim Boys"
On Wednesday January 4, 2006 a black mother gave evidence at an inquest. At
Southwark Coroners Court in southeast London, Ruth Marriott spoke of the last
days of her son Adrian Marriott. He had been an accountancy student, but was
also a gang member, belonging to the Peel Den Crew. He was shot five times in
the head on June 8, 2004, a few weeks before his 21st birthday. His body was
found in parkland off Barrington Road in Brixton.
52-year-old Ruth Marriott told the inquest: "We heard the shooting. We heard
gun fire. The thought did strike me that Adrian could be involved, but it was
a fleeting thought. Then we heard from police the following evening what had
happened. Adrian was told on the Sunday prior to his death that he would be
killed if he did not become a Muslim by the Wednesday, which was the day he
died."
John Sampson, the coroner, asked if her son had taken the threat seriously.
She answered: "I do not think he did." Sampson later declared that Adrian
Marriot had been unlawfully killed.
Ruth Marriott last saw her son on the day before he died. She said: "He was
happy. He was pestering me to order something for him out of my catalogue. He
liked music and football, but Adrian was very much a family man. He also loved
his dog. They would go out together regularly to the park that he died in."
The gang that ordered Adrian Marriott to convert to Islam is called The Muslim
Boys. Until the killing, its ascendancy passed mainly unnoticed by the media.
The Muslim Boys were viewed as just another of the many gangs that operated in
south London, with names such as the Stockwell Crew, the Peel Den Crew, Mad
Crew or Mad4T, the SMS (South Man Syndicate, also known as South Man Dem) and
PDC (Poverty Driven Children). The police took the threat of the Muslim Boys
more seriously. When Adrian Marriott's funeral took place in Brixton, the
ceremony was guarded by armed police.
The Muslim Boys drew their recruits, mainly young black youths, from Brixton,
Peckham, Lambeth, and Streatham. They targeted run-down housing projects such
as the Angel Town Estate in Brixton where Adrian Marriott lived with his
mother, his brother David, sister Tara and other siblings. The gang's core
membership originally came from another housing project in Brixton called the
Myatt's Field Estate. The Muslim Boys made most of their income by committing
robberies, stealing from drug dealers and laundering money. They gained a
fearsome reputation amongst their peers through their forced conversions to
Islam.
Before Adrian Marriott was given the order to convert to Islam or die, his
sister Tara had already become a target of the Muslim Boys. Tara Marriott and
her friend Jade Okai gave in to the gang's demands and converted. They were
given hijabs, Muslim headscarfs, which they were ordered to wear. They were
also given Muslim books, DVDs and copies of the Koran, by two men who would
later be charged with Adrian's murder.
In September 2005 three young men, Marcus Archer, Aaron Irving-Simpson and
Marlon Stubbs, all aged 24, stood trial for the murder of Adrian Marriott. A
jury at the Old Bailey heard that a few days before his murder, Adrian told
his brother that Marlon Stubbs and two other individuals had threatened him at
gunpoint and demanded £500 ($979). Shortly after this, Marriott and an
associate "accosted" Archer at Loughborough Junction train station. Stubbs
then telephoned Marriot's sister Tara and said: "Your brother is a little
tadpole. He just messed with a shark, a whale." Stubbs already had a
conviction for raping two schoolgirls.
The trial soon collapsed, and two of the accused were set free. Marcus Archer
was jailed for eight years for illegal possession of a firearm. When Archer
was arrested for Marriott's murder outside a Croydon mosque in July 2004, a
loaded gun was found in his pocket. No one from the gang has been convicted of
Adrian Marriott's killing. Though he belonged to a gang, Marriott's mother
Ruth said of him: "Adrian was my protector. He always looked after me."
A month after Adrian Marriott was killed, apparently with five machine gun
bullets fired at close range into his skull, one of his friends had tried to
exact "street justice" upon Aaron Irving-Simpson of the Muslim Boys gang.
Nyrome Hinds attacked Irving-Simpson at a bus stop in Norwood. During the
subsequent fight, Hinds pulled out a machine gun and a standard pistol. He was
later sentenced to 14 years' jail. The £13,505 cash ($26,432) he had with him
at the time of his arrest was forfeited by Inner London Crown court on
December 21, 2005.
In 2005, about 20 "hardcore" members of the Muslim Boys gang were in jail, but
prison was just another place to continue intimidation and recruitment. In
February of that year, a journalist from the Evening Standard newspaper
interviewed one of the Muslim Boys. 21-year-old Winston was "converted" in
prison. He said: "Now we all go to mosque together. If I refuse, they blow
[shoot] me, innit. I pray twice a day: before I do crime, and after. I ask
Allah for a blessing when I'm out on the street. Afterwards, I apologize to
Allah for what I done."
Winston, who claimed to support Osama bin Laden, described his love of knives
and spoke casually of the arsenal of guns possessed by gang members. These
included Mac-10 machine pistols. He boasted of the money that the gang made
from robberies, and said: "Then, after midnight me and my bruvs go to mosque
to pray."
Continue...
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/global.php?id=1386133
News Source: familysecuritymatters.org
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http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3037
Britain's Muslim Gang Culture
Immigration; Posted on: 2008-01-18
[ Printer friendly / Instant flyer ]
Coming Soon to a Town Near You?
Part Three of Three
Part One
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2973
Part Two
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2993
Adrian Morgan
... The current gang culture of London and other British cities, like those in
the rookeries of former times, draws its membership from the poor and socially
dispossessed, who attempt to assert control over small closely-defined
territories. Where the rookeries' inhabitants engaged in robberies and traded
in cheap alcohol, contemporary gangs rob and steal and trade drugs, and
sometimes weapons.
In 1976, I went as a student to live in the Borough of Hackney, in East
London. I soon heard of gang rivalry between individuals living in three
housing projects. Now, Hackney has more than 30 such gangs, each one connected
to a particular "estate" or housing project. Some of the gangs are black, some
racially mixed, while the Bengal Tigers, who operate in the south of the
borough, are Bangladeshi Muslims. The territorial instinct of these gangs is
astounding.
Last month, a 16-year-old black youth named Nassirudeen Osawe was killed at a
bus stop in Hackney's neighboring borough of Islington, the 27th teenager to
die in the capital in 2007. He was stabbed to death at 2.30 pm in the
afternoon on busy Upper Street. He was six days away from celebrating his 17th
birthday. According to the Guardian, police investigations were being made
into the activities of members of the "Shakespeare" gang, who live in a bleak
housing project on the edge of Hackney known as Milton Gardens Estate. It
appears that Nass Osawe was killed for "offending" members of this gang,
probably by being seen on their territory.
In 1984, when European "regeneration" money was flowing into Hackney, I
designed letterheads for the community center based in Milton Gardens. Though
the local young people then were boisterous, they were generally friendly to
each other and to outsiders. Now the Shakespeare gang, which has members as
young as 10 years old, defines the Milton Gardens neighborhood.
An internal police report quoted by the Guardian claimed that Hackney now has
the "the highest rates of increase of gun and knife crime in London,"
involving "terrible acts of gratuitous violence." The gangs engage in warfare
based on postcodes (zip codes). The Guardian quoted a member of the
Metropolitan Police's Violent Crime Directorate, who said: "There have always
been territorial gangs in London. What's different is the levels of violence
that are used. In most cases it is knives, and, extremely rarely, guns. It is
postcode related. I've spoken to young people who say it's about respecting
territory and, because they've got nothing else, they have to hold on to what
little they have got. And the trigger seems more tightly sprung. It's not a
phenomenon that's going to go away overnight."
When a teenager can have his life snatched away merely for being on another
gang's "turf," it is obvious that the growing phenomenon of gang culture is
creating for young people a climate of fear and defensiveness. Trapped in
shabby housing projects they are pressured to join gangs, where they gain
protection from other rival gangs. In such a paranoid climate, it is small
wonder that ethnic and religious tensions are now thriving in some regions of
Britain.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Hackney was racially mixed and genuinely
tolerant. The problems for Hackney began in the mid 1980s, when properties
began to be bought by white professionals from outside the borough. Suddenly
the "haves" were living next to the "have nots" in the same streets, and
resentments began to grow. At the end of the 1980s, new migrants began to
flood the borough. First came Kurdish and Turkish refugees, followed in the
1990s by Somalis, then Bosnians, and more recently, members of European Union
countries. With different disadvantaged groups all competing for the same
diminishing supply of homes and jobs, the minority groups have no love for
each other.
Continue...
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/global.php?id=1386161
News Source: familysecuritymatters.org
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# Britain's Muslim Gang Culture: Coming Soon to a Town Near You?
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# Britain's Muslim Gang Culture
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2973