UK soldier killed in London in reprisal for Afghanistan and Iraq wars
By Robert Stevens,wsws.org
Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of British soldier Lee Rigby, explaining in broad daylight how the act was in keeping with lex talionis, “an eye for an eye”, blowback for British complicity in global imperialism’s crimes.
The killing of drummer Lee Rigby, 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, near London’s Woolwich army barracks on Wednesday was a horrific act. Rigby was first run down by two men in a car, who then set about him with knives and a cleaver.
One of the men who carried out the killing was identified as Michael Adebolajo, a 28-year-old British citizen of Nigerian descent. The other has only been identified as a naturalized Nigerian. Both were shot by police and are in hospital, one in a critical condition.
For reasons yet to be explained, it reportedly took up to 20 minutes for police to arrive on the scene. In that time Adebolajo spoke to several passers-by and was filmed by one making an extensive statement confirming that the attack was motivated by anger at the actions of British imperialism in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
“The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers”, he said. “And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
“So what if we want to live by the Sharia in Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us? Rather you lot are extreme. You are the ones that when you drop a bomb you think it hits one person? Or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family?”
Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, who approached Adebolajo in an attempt to calm him and prevent any further deaths, said, “I spoke to him for more than five minutes. I asked him why he had done what he had done. He said he had killed the man because he [the victim] was a British soldier who killed Muslim women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was furious about the British army being over there”.
[pullquote] All terrorism is ugly, but it is not incomprehensible. There are always reasons and history behind such acts. The Western media are quick to parade images of “low tech, retail terrorism” —suicide bombers, curbside explosives, people who hack others to death, like Adebolajo —before their audiences, but carefully hide the shocking images resulting from the application of high-tech, wholesale terrorism in what is euphemistically called “low intensity conflicts”, the terrorism carried out by great military powers with advanced weapons for immoral ends. [/pullquote]
From a devout Christian family, Adebolajo—according to Anjem Choudary, the former leader of the banned radical Islamist organisation, Al Muhajiroun—converted to Islam in 2003.
It has now been admitted that both men were known to the security services. The BBC has revealed footage of Adebolajo taking part in an Islamist demonstration in 2007, standing next to Choudary. On Wednesday evening BBC’s Newsnight, correspondent Richard Watson cited a “source who knows the British jihadi scene very well” who “suggested to me that just last year this young man was stopped or arrested … on his way to join Al Shabaab in Somalia”.
Yesterday the BBC substantiated this account, saying it was told by “senior Whitehall sources” that “one of the suspects was intercepted by police last year, while leaving the country”.
The Guardian reported Thursday that the two suspects in Rigby’s killing “had been known to the domestic security service MI5 and the police over an eight-year period, but had been assessed as peripheral figures and thus not subjected to a full-scale investigation”. In fact, “Adebolajo … had complained of harassment by MI5 in the last three years after he came to the intelligence agency’s attention”.
In addition, two further arrests were made yesterday, a 29-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman, on suspicion of conspiracy to murder—indicating that MI5 and Special Branch were aware of the two killers’ associates.
The murder of a human being in London in broad daylight, the sight of blood running down the street, the savagery of the attack, all this has provoked understandable shock in the population.
At the same time, however violent and disoriented the act, can anyone doubt that it is related to what is taking place in the world and to the character of the operations of the British state? The very fact that more than one individual was involved points to the fact that this was not the work of an isolated madman.
To explain an action is not to legitimize it, much less to lend political support. The Woolwich killing will have reactionary consequences. Such acts serve to benumb the population and play into the hands of the most sinister forces. The state will seek to exploit popular sympathy for the slaughtered individual to build up the military and police and deepen the assault on basic democratic rights.
The statement by Adebolajo, the eyewitness account of Loyau-Kennett and subsequent events refute the attempts by sections of the media and the political elite to deny the obvious connection between the murder and British foreign policy.
Prime Minister David Cameron flew back from talks with French President François Hollande in Paris on news of the attack, to chair a meeting of the governmental emergency COBRA committee. Afterwards he made a statement denying that Rigby’s death had anything to do with Britain’s actions in Africa and the Middle East over the last years.
The attacks were “solely and purely” the responsibility of the individuals involved. “Britain works with our international partners to make the world safe from terrorism, terrorism that has taken more Muslim lives than any other religion. It is an utter perversion of the truth to pretend anything different”.
