Bradford is still “in shock” almost a week after the killing of Kulsuma Akter, who was stabbed to death while pushing her seven-month-old son in a pram in the city centre.
The 27-year-old, who her cousin said was “always smiling and liked to make people laugh”, was attacked outside a shop in the Westgate area last Saturday.
Her husband, Habibur Masum, appeared at Bradford crown court on Friday afternoon via video link charged with murder and possession of a bladed article.
Masum, 25, was arrested in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, on Tuesday after a four-day manhunt. Four other men, who were in their 20s and from the West Midlands, were arrested for assisting an offender and drug offences.
Akter had come to the UK from Bangladesh, where Masum was also from. She had been living above a shop in Oldham but was staying in Bradford on the day she was killed.
Kavita Tripathi, who lives a few streets away in Bradford, said it was “difficult to accept” such an attack had happened on her doorstep. “I feel very uncomfortable. I used to feel very safe here but I had a knock on my door the other night and it made me feel very frightened,” she said.
Muhammad Shehzad said crime had worsened significantly since he came to the UK in 2003. He blamed Rishi Sunak for driving down living standards to the point where people felt the need to turn to crime. “If you give a good chance to work, crime goes down,” said Shehzad. “There needs to be more investment in this country, my home.”
Shehzad’s wife, Sana, said she had felt afraid to go out during Eid al-Fitr celebrations on Wednesday evening. “Every day things are getting worse. There are too many incidents, you don’t feel safe,” she said.
Agnes Chiaha, a college student, said she was worried about the number of young men who now routinely carried knives. “Knife crime is more normalised. If people want to fight, they bring knives. They want to look cool, it’s peer pressure. They don’t think about the consequences,” she said.
Her friend Alisha Ahmed added: “They don’t communicate, they just turn to violence.”
Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, said the city had been traumatised by what was a rare attack on an ordinary day.
“People are very clear this is a very isolated incident and Bradford isn’t like this,” she said, adding that the fear was not that people would be killed in a random attack on the street but that women were being murdered by men.
“I went to speak to literally hundreds of women in the Chaand Raat events, prior to Eid, where everybody gets their mehndi done. We had a conversation and all of them were saying: ‘When is this going to stop, men killing women?’ It wasn’t about Bradford, it was generally women really, really angry that, again, a woman has been murdered. They were saying: ‘Naz you need to talk more about it. This has got to stop.’
“Yes, it was absolutely shocking for people in Bradford because we just don’t see that, but it was more about, when is domestic violence going to stop? And that is consistent with any community – whether that’s Bradford or London, after the Sarah Everard murder – no matter where it is, it is the consistent thing you will hear every time a woman is murdered.”
Shah said she had met the Bradford residents who had rushed to help, including two off-duty doctors and a grocer, who now needed counselling and were struggling to sleep because they kept reliving the “horrific” details of the attack. She had been impressed by their courage and resourcefulness in trying to save Akter, she said.
The MP added: “Bradford is traumatised by it but Bradford also knows that when there is something that happens, Bradford steps up. And it was indicative of what happened when people were trying to rescue her, help her, that’s what epitomises it.”
Masum remains in custody with a provisional trial date set for 18 November.
