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Features

Bijan Ebrahimi Victim of "Institutional Racism"

December 18, 2017
1 min read
Bijan Ebrahimi Victim of "Institutional Racism"

 

UK police officers and council officials were institutionally racist when dealing with Bijam Ebrahimi, an Iranian refugee who was murdered in 2013, a report has found.

The Safer Bristol Partnership (SBP), a group tackling crime, the causes behind it and the impact on communities, said there was a "collective failure" by Avon and Somerset Police and Bristol City Council in the case of Bijan Ebrahimi.

After years of intimidation and abuse, Ebrahimi’s neighbor on a Bristol estate, Lee James, beat Ebrahami to death before setting his body on fire in July 2013. James was jailed for life. 

The recent report said that police and the council "repeatedly sided with the abusers,” and police dismissed Ebrahimi’s repeated complaints about his neighbors’ treatment of him, referring to him as a “time waster.” 

In July 2017, an Independent Police Complaints Commission report found that Ebrahimi had complained to police for up to seven years before he was murdered.

When Ebrahimi was murdered in Bristol in July 2013, IranWire commissioned Liana Aghajanian to cover the case. Her article is the product of weeks of in-depth reportage, with insights from dozens of interviews spanning Ebrahimi’s family, Bristol hate crime activists, local officials and academics in a quest to understand the complex array of factors that ultimately led to his death. 

Read Murder in Bristol: part onepart twopart threepart four.

With additional reporting from Giles Crosse.

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