sombre times in Colchester

The verges on either side of the road leading into Colchester are still sealed off by the police. There are police cars parked at each end, on both sides of the dual carriageway, and the verges are closed to pedestrians by swathes of blue and white police tape.  Essex Police have brought in reinforcements from outside: yesterday the Systems Administrator saw a Met Police dog team van. It was on yesterday's news that they had drained a nearby lake in the search for the weapon, or any other clue, and this afternoon it was announced a resident had found a knife in the road in the nearby Greenstead estate.  All of this is of course because of the fatal stabbing of Saudi graduate student Nahid Almanea, in broad daylight.

And on Sunday morning as we walked through Colchester Castle Park from the car park in Cowdray Avenue to a friend's house in the Dutch Quarter for her birthday lunch, we passed the posters appealing for witnesses or information about the killing of James Attfield, who was stabbed more than a hundred times.  That attack took place less than three months ago, at the end of March.

The headlines in the local paper today screamed that we have a maniac at loose among us.  The police are being more guarded in their public statements as to whether the two murders are linked. They might be, they might not.  The death of the poor Saudi student has been getting regular cover on the national news bulletins.  The killing of James Attfield didn't get so much national attention (though there is an appeal on the Crimewatch website), which makes me rather uncomfortable.  Is it that murders which happen late at night seem less threatening to the rest of us than those which happen in the middle of the morning, when anybody might be out and about?  Does the gender of the two victims have anything to do with it?  Did the fact that James Attfield had previously suffered a brain injury in a car accident make his a less compelling death?  That's a nasty thought.

I rather wish the police had been more careful and nuanced in how they expressed the idea that Nahid Almanea might have been singled out for attack because of her Islamic dress.  That is a possibility, but so far as we know there is not yet any evidence for it.  If it should emerge later on that she was killed for some other reason, by somebody known to her, or a serial killer who would have killed anybody who happened to be there at the time, it will be too late by then to undo the effects of the headlines like the one in yesterday's Independent, thousands attend the funeral of woman killed for being a Muslim.  Tens of thousands of Muslims are going to believe that now, whatever the eventual truth turns out to be.

It is not a nice thought at all, that two people have been stabbed to death in the locality in the past three months, and that whoever did it is still at large in the community, and managed to return home without anybody else noticing or reporting that they were heavily stained with blood.  Not nice at all.