Alice Gross, the 14-year-old whose sexual assault and killing in August 2014 at the hands of a Latvian man was used by pro-Brexit campaigners to argue against free movement, wrote a thoughtful essay in defence of the EU just months before her death, her parents have revealed.
Gross wrote compassionately about the cultural benefits of European migration and, with an unsettling prescience, the flaws of blocking foreign criminals from entering the country.
“Personally, I believe that the United Kingdom should remain a member of the EU as it allows our country to be considered a communal and friendly country,” she wrote.
In an interview with the Guardian, Alice’s mother Rosalind Hodgkiss said the essay was “horribly ironic”. Her daughter’s killer, Arnis Zalkalns, had served eight years in jail in Latvia for the brutal murder of his wife. Zalkalns entered the UK in 2007 and had even been arrested by the Metropolitan police on suspicion of sexual assault in 2009 before he attacked Alice in August 2014. But it was not until after he was reported missing that the builder’s criminal record came to light. It was too late; Alice was dead and so was Zalkalns. He hanged himself from a tree a mile from the canal towpath where he is believed to have abducted her.
With the knowledge of how Alice met her end, reading her essay is eerie. Discussing Ukip’s call for foreign criminals to be barred from crossing the border into the UK, she wrote in late May 2014: “They believe that this will keep Britain safe from crime by eliminating the number of criminals living in its premises. However, I believe that this takes away the concept of equality amongst the community by implying that criminals don’t deserve the same rights everyone else has. It also depicts Britain to believe foreign criminals are different and dangerous compared to the British criminals, reintroducing the idea of racism.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... before-her
Horrible irony
Horrible irony
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”