Veil and escape

Melanie Phillips:

A horrendous crime has now taken on the character of the blackest and most sickening farce. PC Sharon Beshenivsky was gunned down in a bungled robbery, leaving a broken-hearted husband and three motherless children.

Earlier this week, four men were convicted of her killing. Two of the gang, Mustaf Jama and his younger brother Yusuf, were Somali asylum seekers with a string of criminal convictions.

But it has been reported — according to ‘police sources’ — that Mustaf may have managed to escape justice by fleeing back to Somalia using his sister’s passport and dressed as a woman in a niqab, a veil that covers the entire body leaving only the eyes visible.

At no stage, it is claimed, did anyone at Heathrow checking that passport ask him to remove the niqab — despite the fact that, after PC Beshenivsky’s murder, his photograph as a prime suspect had been circulated to every police force, port and airport in the country.

If it is true that a prime suspect can evade capture by hiding behind a full-face veil, in the expectation that no one at the airport will insist he removes it, this would be a scandal with terrifying implications for this country’s capacity to deter or detect both crime and terrorism.

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One of the ways the Klu Klux Klan was defeated was by laws that prohibited the wearing of masks to cover the face. Militant Islam is the equivalent of the Klan when it comes to wearing masks to hide the identity of the perp. Tolerance for this weird custom that some Muslims use creates a dander that is unacceptable.