Anuj Bidve murder: GMP therapists, creepy Hazel Blears and saving Manchester’s education industry
ANUJ Bidve: a look at the murder of the Indian student in Salford on Boxing Day: creeping police, Hazel Blears and money…
Bidve, 23, a microelectronics post-graduate student at Lancaster university, was shot dead in Manchester on Christmas night.
He was not. He was shot in the very early hours of Boxing Day.
Rakesh Sonawane, Anuj Bidve’s brother-in-law tells the paper:
“Chief superintendent Russ Jackson of the Greater Manchester police, plus a specially trained family liaison officer…will be visiting Pune on Monday.”
Chief superintendent Barry Russel Jackson, detective constable Peter Christian Rickards and police constable Esther Barbara Lambert have flown to Pune to meet the family.
Yeah, just three coppers have headed to India to tell the family that Anuj Bidve is dead. Only three. This is not an investigation. This is PR. The Greater Manchester Police did not tell Anuj Bidve’s parents their son had died. The father’s phone number was on Anuj Bidve’s mobile phone. Yet, no-one from the police called it. Anuj Bidve’s family discovered he had died over Facebook.
The GMP have made five arrests. They have used the words “racially motivated” in connection with the murder. They have called it a “hate crime” but – get his – not a racist one. The police are running rings around themselves.
The GMP has posted a £50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the “white” man who murdered Anuj Bidve.
Says Assistant Chief Constable Dawn Copley:
“It is important to me personally – and Greater Manchester Police – to have someone from the force meet with Anuj’s family at the earliest opportunity and help support them at this time.”
Feel free to sneer and toll your eyes. There’s big money in foreign students studying in the UK. The Chief Super is heading to see the victim’s family. His deputy has taken the murder personally. And the families of victims of every other murder on the GMP patch can expect the same aftercare service being given to Anuj Bidve?
And this vin dnaIndia:
On Saturday, two British Members of Parliament, Keith Vaz, and Hazel Anne Blears, called on Anuj Bidve’s family in Pune assuring them of fullest co-operation from the UK government in the murder investigations of the micro-engineering student at Lancaster University.
Says the aforesaid Mr Sonawane:
“The MPs told us that the case was being taken very seriously at the British Parliament. They have asked for a report on investigations into the case and have assured us that they would extend every possible help to us. In fact, they have asked us to meet them when we go to Greater Manchester.”
Meet Hazel Blears and find your son’s killer. How? This is more self-serving PR. Anuj Bidve’s is dead and his family are being sued as pawns in a PR game. Vaz is an Anglo-Indian (born in Yemen) and he has NOT been murdered in England.
Nehal Sonawane, Anuj Bidve’s older sister, speaks to the Daily Telegraph:
Her husband, Rakesh, is talking urgently into the phone to the police in Manchester, trying to find out when the body will be flown home. That is what the family wants most now: that and to understand what was in the mind of the gunman…
“The guy who shot him laughed at him before he ran off. This was a sadistic attack,” says Nehal.
Anuj Bidve’s family are no fools. Rackesh soon nails creeping Blears and Vaz, and the therapists at the GMP:
“Anuj was pretty excited about the UK. It was a very highly ranked college and we thought he was going to pursue an education in one of the best places in the world .But we were a bit hesitant in terms of sending him to the UK and, unfortunately, our concerns proved to be correct. In my opinion, the atmosphere in the UK is one where Indians are probably not welcomed easily.”
Is he right? Yes. Do the police make Indians welcome, say, to their own ranks?
“Are we accepted there? This is the question coming again and again to our minds, and I think we have got the answer with what has happened to Anuj.”
Rackesh thinks race played a big part in Anuj Bidve’s murder.
Says the Telegraph:
Though detectives are treating Anuj’s murder as a racially-motivated “hate crime,” they admit there is “no evidence” that it actually was.
No. They are not. They said it was a hate crime. They did not say it was racially motivated. The GMP just bandied about the phrase racially motivated. The police are not sure about anything other than that Anuj Bidve is dead.
Andrew Gilligan and Gethin Chamberlain in Pune, India, then nail the GMP:
The designation appears to have been made as much to protect the police from charges of racism as for any other reason.
Racist police? As if!
Rackesh explains how he first got in touch with the GMP:
“They had no idea what I was talking about. All they could tell me was that Manchester was a large place and I needed to give them more details.”
Then:
Finally, a policewoman rang back to confirm Anuj was dead.
Again Gilligan and Chamberlain smash the PR:
It is the randomness, rather than any potential race aspect, which is scariest. In the space of a few minutes, the young students had wandered, without knowing, from the sanitised Costa Coffee-land of Salford Quays – with its Lowry museum, its budget hotels and its huge new BBC studios – into a small patch of streets, which is in the worst 1 per cent of any area in the country for crime.
Even Hazel Blears can’t protect you there.
Anuj’s murder doesn’t prove that Salford, or Britain, is unsafe. In the whole of Greater Manchester, an area of almost three million people, there were 35 homicides in the year to April 2010, about half the rate per person of Anuj’s home town, Pune. Only one of those 35 killings was carried out with a gun.
Says Subhash Bidve, Anhujk’s father:
“This kind of incident is going to hamper the image of the UK. Your inner cities have problems. You can’t just say this street is dangerous and leave it at that. If it is dangerous, there should be more security, some alarms, some warnings. It should be indicated very clearly so that visitors to the city would know. Last year, more than 38,000 Indian students went to the UK, 300 of them from Pune alone. This killing will change all that, Subhash thinks. “It will be reduced drastically next year. We are very emotional people, very sentimental. We care about our families. All our people will think now is whether to go to the UK for our studies.”
The paper warns:
A spate of attacks – which clearly were racist – on Indian students in Australia reduced enrolments by almost half.
So. Come on GMP and the MPs, the education industry needs you…
Posted: 1st, January 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comments (4) | TrackBack | Permalink
