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Murder of Lee Rigby

Woolwich, London The 22nd of May 2013 AD

The death of Drummer Lee Rigby, a soldier serving in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers stationed at Woolwich Barracks in Southeast London, shocked the nation and the wider world - President Barrack Obama telephoned David Cameron to express solidarity with Britain at a difficult moment. The brutal violence of that death was conveyed starkly in the post-mortem’s clinically worded findings that the 25-year-old from Bury had suffered ‘multiple incised wounds’.

What made the horror all the more stunning was that such an event could happen in broad daylight in a busy street in the capital, London buses filled with passengers passing close by. The police have no shortage of witnesses, and in this age of instant media they even have video footage taken at the scene, some of that footage already controversially – given the content - broadcast.

The two suspects - awaiting their day in court as this piece is written - were shot by armed police near the spot where Lee Rigby died. English justice will give them a fair trial as is only right. In this country you remain innocent until proven guilty, and only the guilty are punished. Lee Rigby, not even accused of committing any crime, was denied those niceties. The vast majority here decry those who, perhaps incensed beyond reason by Lee Rigby’s terrible death or more darkly wishing to use it as an excuse for their actions, after the event attacked in one way or another nearly 200 Muslim targets in this country from Gillingham to Grimsby in spite of many mainstream Muslim leaders condemning the attack. Such Muslim leaders are surely more representative of those holding that faith than the alleged attackers. More representative of our broader nation and civilisation, or so we have to hope, were the women who just after the alleged deadly assault ignored the still apparent dangers and sought to give succour to the dying, or perhaps by that time protect the body of the already dead, young soldier.

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