UK is ‘broke and broken,’ new government says as it prepares to tackle shortfall in public finances

LONDON: Authorities in Bulgaria have been accused of letting three Egyptian teenagers die by ignoring emergency calls and delaying attempts to rescue them, The Guardian reported.

The incident took place in sub-zero temperatures near the Bulgarian-Turkish border late last month.

Evidence of the authorities’ failure to save the boys was collected in a dossier produced by two humanitarian organizations, No Name Kitchen and Collettivo Rotte Balcaniche.

The dossier, seen by The Guardian, contains photos, geolocations and personal testimonies, and reveals a wider pattern of brutality against migrants on the borders of Europe.

The Bulgarian border with Turkiye is a common crossing point for asylum-seekers but contains treacherous terrain, as well as freezing winter weather.

The two humanitarian organizations said that they were first alerted that an appeal for help had been made on Dec. 27 by the Egyptian trio.

Calls had been made to an emergency charity hotline, referring to three teenagers “at immediate risk of death.”

The GPS location of the three Egyptians, who were lost in the forests of southeastern Bulgaria, was sent to the hotline.

Charity workers then forwarded the information to the official 112 emergency number and attempted to locate the boys themselves.

But Bulgarian border police allegedly hindered the charity rescue attempts even after being shown a video of one of the Egyptian teenagers in the snow.

The boys were later identified as Ahmed Samra, 17, Ahmed El-Awdan, 16, and 15-year-old Seifalla El-Beltagy.

They were later found dead, with the former having “dog paw prints and boot prints around his body.”

This “indicates that the border police had already found him, maybe still alive or dead, but had chosen to leave him there in the cold,” the dossier said.

After charity staff later returned to the scene, they discovered that all traces of the prints had been removed.

One of the bodies of the deceased was found to have been partly eaten by an animal.

The dossier released by the two organizations also details harassment of charity rescue teams as well as vandalism of one of their cars.

Staff belonging to one rescue team had their passports and phones seized by Bulgarian police.

Human rights organizations have warned that authorities in European border countries are deploying tactics to target humanitarian groups helping asylum-seekers.

No Name Kitchen and Collettivo Rotte Balcaniche called for an “independent, formal investigation” into “systemic violence and negligence by Bulgarian authorities” and “degrading treatment of people on the move.”

Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry rejected the allegations and said that investigations into the case continued.

“In 2024, there were 515 search-and-rescue operations conducted by (the) general directorate border police of Bulgaria with the purpose (of providing) medical assistance to third-country nationals who managed to enter the country irregularly,” the ministry said.

“Our patrols reacted to all of those signals in a timely manner, considering how crucial this is when a person is exposed to extreme weather conditions.”

One activist described the reaction of Bulgarian border police to the three Egyptian teenagers as “utterly shocking.”

They said: “It should not be the responsibility of worried activists to reach people in the forest — border police are trained and paid to do so.

“It is utterly shocking that three minors froze to death in the forest even though multiple alerts to 112 had been placed. This is a huge failure for everyone.”

LONDON: The UK is suffering from a “tidal wave of Islamophobia,” the outgoing leader of one of the country’s largest Muslim bodies has warned.

Zara Mohammed has served as the first female leader of the Muslim Council of Britain since 2021, and through her tenure tackled nationwide riots last year, the COVID-19 pandemic, and being frozen out of government contact.

Ahead of her departure as MCB general secretary on Saturday, Mohammed spoke to the BBC about the difficulties she has faced over the last four years.

“It was the Southport riots for us that made it really quite alarming,” she said, referring to nationwide disorder last year in the wake of a stabbing attack in Southport.

“It was so visceral. We were watching on our screens: People breaking doors down, stopping cars, attacking taxi drivers, smashing windows, smashing mosques,” she told the BBC. “The kind of evil we saw was really terrifying and I felt like, am I even making a difference?”

The rioting was partly triggered by false online rumors that the attacker was a Muslim asylum-seeker.

Yet the government at the time had refused to engage with Mohammed, and the largest umbrella Muslim organization in Britain “wasn’t being talked to,” she said.

“The justification was there, the urgency, the necessity of engagement was there, British Muslims were under attack, mosques were under attack.”

In the year since the war in Gaza began, monitoring group Tell Mama UK recorded 4,971 instances of Islamophobic hate in Britain — the highest figure in 14 years.

The MCB had done “a lot of community building and political advocacy” in a bid to tackle the problem, yet this had failed to shift mainstream narratives surrounding British Muslims, Mohammed said.

“There has been such a normalization of Islamophobic rhetoric without it being challenged or condemned,” she added.

“We could say we’re making a difference but then what is being seen in national discourse does not seem to translate.”

Abuse of Muslim politicians across the UK, including former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, demonstrates a broader trend of rising Islamophobia, Mohammed said.

“You’re constantly firefighting. Did we make British Muslims’ lives better? On one hand, yes, because we raised these issues, we took them to a national platform. But with Islamophobia, we’re still having the same conversation,” she added.

“We still haven’t been able to break through, whether it’s government engagement, Islamophobia or social mobility.”