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WaPo: Unhinged Murderous Migrant Was ‘Handsome’ Man After A ‘New Beginning’

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Blake Neff Reporter
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The Washington Post has published an article showing strong sympathy for a European migrant who murdered two innocent people with a knife, describing him as a “handsome man” in search of a “new beginning” before he was unfortunately sidetracked into mass murder.

Abraham Ukbagabir, a migrant from Eritrea, horrified Sweden last month when, without provocation, he attacked two people at an Ikea store and stabbed them to death, before turning the knife on himself in a failed suicide attempt. Ukbagabir has admitted perpetrating the crime, saying he was distressed over his impending deportation to Italy where his asylum claim was to be heard. Ukbagabir was accompanied to the Ikea by another Eritrean, Yohannes Mahari, who was arrested after the killings, but thus far has professed his innocence.

Despite Ukbagabir’s dreadful crime, Washington Post writer Michael Miller portrays him, and by extension the two people he murdered, as the sad victims of insufficiently generous immigration policy.

“When Abraham Ukbagabir arrived in Sweden sometime this spring, he hoped he had put Eritrea and his painful journey behind him forever,” the Post says. “The refugee shelter in Arboga, a small town near Västerås, was little more than a low-slung motel made of corrugated metal and cinder blocks. But for Ukbagabir, a handsome 35-year-old, it was a new beginning.”

Ukbagabir’s new beginning was stolen from him, though, by the fact he was in an unspecified “altercation” in Italy that forced him to give his fingerprints to Italian police. As a result, he was going to have to leave Sweden to have his asylum claim heard in Italy.

So, he went to an Ikea, took some knives out of a box, and murdered some people. But that was simply a cry of “desperation,” the Post says.

“Ukbagabir explained that he ‘just lost control’ after learning that he was going to be sent back to Italy,” Miller writes, citing his interview with police. Miller quotes from the police report: “‘That’s why he committed the acts inside Ikea against these two individuals … to make people understand him.'”

The real tragedy of the Ikea butchery, the Post suggests, is that by brutally murdering several Swedes, Ukbagabir may make Sweden skeptical of accepting thousands of additional migrants. It notes that after the murders, some bloggers and politicians claimed the attack was Islam-related (Ukbagabir says he is Christian), and that some falsely claimed the stabbing victims had been beheaded (which is evidently much worse than simply being dead). Refugee shelters, the Post says, were attacked with eggs and in one case a firebomb, though none of these attacks actually hurt anybody. (RELATED: Immigrant To Sweden Rapes Preteen, Gets Community Service)

Miller also laments for Mahari, who was initially suspected of involvement in the crime and suffered such indignities as death threats and having his knee hurt when police tackled him while he fled the scene of the murders.

“The reality of the Ikea incident is much more complicated [than the problem of pro-immigration policies],” Miller says. “It’s the story of two migrants thrust together by fate and united by a mistaken media. And it’s a story of desperation, perhaps madness, but not Islam.”

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