Naruddin Ahmed – ‘I felt stinging and thought: Oh this is crazy. I’ve been stabbed’

EVERYONE knows Naruddin Ahmed on the Andover estate. On a bright Wednesday evening, dozens of people of all ages and backgrounds stopped the 28-year-old to ask how he’s recovering after being stabbed 11 times a fortnight ago.

Nurul – as he’s known – was stabbed in Tollington Place by a group of 15 men and teenagers, leaving him with a punctured lung and multiple stab wounds to his back and spine. 

A week later, 21-year-old Andrew Jaipaul was murdered by a group of up to 25 young men – only streets away.

Of his attack, Nurul said: “They asked me what estate I came from and then one of them hit me on the head with a stick. 

“I felt lots of pokes on my back, and more and more. It didn’t hurt... then I turned around, and I see a knife. Then I felt some wetness and stinging, and  thought: ‘Oh this is crazy. I’ve been stabbed.’ 

“I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t stand up any more, but by that time they’d gone away. I called the police by myself. Then to keep myself awake, I started reciting the Muslim verses my mum had taught me in my head.”

Nurul says police made one ill-timed attempt to ask who his attackers were, while he lay in a Whitechapel hospital hours after the attack

“I was barely conscious,” he said. “I was still bleeding when the officers came. They were asking me questions when I was in pain and I could hardly talk. I said please come back again tomorrow... I knew some of the attackers by name, but they didn’t come back to ask any further questions. If they took this kind of thing more seriously, they may have arrested the boys.”

Nurul knows a lot about the gangs who operate in his area. The main one hails from the nearby Elthorne estate and calls itself Busy Block and numbers about 70 or 80 youths. 

“The way they work is that the older boys go up to the 13 or 14-year-olds and say: ‘If you want to be part of the crew, you’ve got to prove yourself.’ So they get these little youngsters to prove themselves by stabbing someone, or shooting some shots around another estate with a shotgun, to show they’re hard enough. 

“Everyone knows that things have been hotting up on this estate for the last four or five months. I got stabbed 11 times, in the daytime. They [the police] should have been here, but they weren’t.”

Nurul claims there are not enough police on the estate and those that do appear are scared, and don’t care about the non-white residents.

“Community support officers will see drug deals going on, and will walk down a different route deliberately to avoid it,” he said. “These are the people who are meant to be stopping it.”

The police fiercely deny this. Detective Superintendent Adrian Usher, who is investigating the attack on Nurul, said: “In terms of the diversity profile of our Safer Neighbourhoods team they more accurately reflect the community than perhaps any other part of the police service. We have a huge number of black and Asian officers and community support officers that work within our community. 

“We’re making every step we can to give the public from every background the confidence they can talk to police. We’re doing the very best we can for Mr Ahmed and trying to identify whoever attacked him.”

He added: “Mr Ahmed did not have a written witness statement taken from the hospital because of his medical condition. We have kept him updated on the investigation. 

“The officer in the case, Detective Sergeant Nolan, has met with him and his family for a couple of hours. I think we’ve done quite a lot to reassure Mr Ahmed and his family. But we obviously haven’t succeeded because he feels the way he does.”

See Related:
• KNIFE GANG NEEDS A HUG
• Grieving father says: ‘All I know is I miss my son. I want him back... he was our good boy’

Published: 8th July, 2011
by PAVAN AMARA