Many in the UK Nigerian community have stopped taking so much interest since it appeared the number of young men of Nigerian descent involved either as victims or as perpetrators of knife crime in the capital were on the decrease,.

However it is important to bring to peoples awareness that knife crime is just as rampant as it has always been.

This morning, I received the sad message of the cruel stabbing and killing of 22 year old Anthony Adekola in Colindale, North London which took place on Saturday. In August there was a reported stabbing in the same area and the victim thankfully made a recovery. It is not clear if Anthony’s killing was a revenge attack in a gangs war.

On Juy 29, 26 year old Christopher George was shot to death in Sebastopol Road Edmonton North London. The news of the murder was widely reported in the news but many would not have associated his English names with being Nigerian.

Christopher was sitting in a parked Mercedes Benz when 2 men approached the car and opened fire, shooting him in the chest at point range.

What is however becoming increasingly alarming is the age of the victims. During the scourge of 2018, the average age of victims of knives and guns murders was 17. Now many of the murdered young me are in their 20s.

On June 8, Alexander Kareem, 20, was riding a scooter near his family home in Shepherd’s Bush when he was gunned down in a case of mistaken identity. And Jeffrey Wegbe, 26,  was shot dead on his doorstep in Kilburn, in the early hours of 14th August.

20 year old Salem Koudou was found with stab wounds following a fight on Wynne Road in Lambeth on the 20th August.

On June 5, Oluwamayowa Adeyemi was fatally shot on the Nightingale Estate, Hackney. He was 21.

On April 26th, 24 year old David Gomoh a NHS worker was stabbed to death, a few yards from his doorstep just a few days after his dad died of the coronavirus.

These are just a few of the deaths by knifing and shooting that have occurred in the capital in just the last 3 months. The recent pandemic has caused a shift of attention and focus away from the problem of gangs crime in the capital and many of the cases that are being reported in the media, are being done with the barest minimum of detail that several of them go unnoticed