A diary kept by an 11-year-old girl recorded the daily fear and misery of living next door to two of Britain’s youngest violent criminals.
The brothers’ attack in Edlington, South Yorkshire, happened 25 days after they were placed with foster carers in the former mining village. Up to then, their home had been on a council estate in a Doncaster suburb seven miles away.
Their 36-year-old divorced mother has seven sons from two relationships; they were Nos 5 and 6. Another brother was sent to a young offender institution this year for mugging an elderly woman.
By the front door of the family’s shabby semi-detached house, a sign reads “Beware of the Kids”. For their next-door neighbours, the warning had long been unnecessary.
Sworn at, injured by rocks and stones, racially abused, their windows smashed, their car damaged, their garden fence dismantled and their rear lawn turned into a dumping ground for detritus, they were living as virtual prisoners in their own home.
Qadir Abdullah (not his real name), an Iraqi Kurd, is a former dentist who speaks five languages and works as a Home Office interpreter and a classroom assistant.
He, his wife, Nazif, and their three young children have British citizenship, but years of close proximity to the brothers has shattered his once-passionate faith in the supposedly British values of decency, tolerance and justice.
The Abdullah family had haunted faces in April, a few days after learning that their long-time tormentors were in custody accused of attempted murder.
When the brothers first began to target them, Mr Abdullah paid a visit next door and spoke to their mother. She laughed in his face and said: “They’re just kids.”
They were kids who graduated from throwing eggs at their neighbours’ house to smashing their windows with stones and then to drawing blood by throwing rocks at Mrs Abdullah and her three-year-old son.
When she ventured outside to take her children to school, they would walk, heads bowed, as cries of: “Pakis, Pakis, go back to your own country” followed them down the road.
The 11-year-old, now aged 12, was the leader, the 10-year-old his faithful lieutenant. He sometimes knocked on the Abdullahs’ front door: “My mum says give me some money and she’ll pay you back tomorrow.” Cash was handed over but never repaid.
The brothers threw fruit, paint, dog food, water balloons, half-eaten burgers, a gas cylinder, bottles, pebbles and gravel — at the house, at the car, into the garden, at their neighbours.
By the start of this year, Mr Abdullah’s children were too scared to go into the garden. His wife was often in tears. When he was out, his family hid behind thick net curtains and locked doors. “I felt like I was having to be a security guard in my own home. My wife kept sobbing and begging me to move away from the area ‘before they injure or kill our children’,” he said.
Treated with contempt by the boys’ mother, he sought help from the police and the local authority. Between August 28 last year and January 30 this year, police officers or police community support officers went to the house five times in response to incidents that he reported.
He also had visits from the council’s safer neighbourhood team. Two joint meetings were held at which everyone was concerned and apologetic and promised that things would change. Nothing did.
Eventually the police asked Mr Abdullah to stop contacting them after every unpleasant encounter with the two brothers. “One officer said to me I should only contact them after every six or seven incidents. A council worker told us to write down everything that happened.”
The task fell to the Abdullahs’ elder daughter, aged 11. In her “evidence folder” she recorded 17 acts of antisocial behaviour by the boys between Christmas Eve and January 31.
When the pair were not targeting the Abdullahs, they were smashing other people’s windows, stoning buses, setting tyres on fire, even stealing and burning a young girl’s new doll. Everyone was scared of them.
“I showed the police my payslip to show them that I pay £400 tax every month. I asked them why I was paying that. I said I should be taking it and paying someone to guard my house,” Mr Abdullah said.
“They laughed. One said to me, ‘What can we do about it? They’re children.’ In my home country, children would never have been allowed to behave like that.”
The two boys were finally taken into care at the beginning of March. The rest of their family left suddenly, accompanied by a fleet of council vehicles and police cars, on an April evening a few days after the attack in Edlington.
Last week, Mr Abdullah reflected on the irony that his own family’s plight might not have finally come to an end, but for the attacks on two children seven miles away.
“My children have been able to go out and play together in the garden this summer. They had never been able to do that before.
“It’s quiet now, peaceful, and my house no longer feels like a prison. So we’re happy now.
“But I feel very sorry for the families of the children who were injured. I blame the mother and father of those two boys, but I also blame the police and the council. They should have acted far more quickly.”
Another neighbour described the boys’ family life as utterly chaotic.
“The whole family behaved like scum. The attack on these two boys was sickening but you have to wonder what chance they had with parents like that.”
A relative said that the boys’ father forced them to watch sadistic horror films. These frightened the young boys so much, she said, that their mother laced their snacks with cannabis to help them to sleep.
At other times, she appeared to have smoked so much cannabis herself that she “simply did not give a damn” about her children.
