LONDON // London's Metropolitan Police are gearing up for the summer tourist influx from the UAE and wider GCC, and are anxious to stress the city is safe despite two high-profile attacks on Emiratis in April.
“We are absolutely satisfied these two attacks were entirely unconnected,” said Makhdum Chishty, Met commander for West London.
Mr Chishty, also head of the Met’s efforts against hate crime, said to have two such events in the city was “shocking but very, very rare – an extraordinary coincidence.
“Although I understand the shock and the concern, and I am not trying to diminish the events in any way, they should not deter people from coming to London.
“London is safe, especially in those areas, and the police presence is high.”
On Thursday, four Britons will appear in court charged over a hammer attack on three Emirati sisters at the Cumberland Hotel, Hyde Park, on April 7.
Philip Spence, 32, is charged with three counts of attempted murder, and two other men and a woman were charged with handling stolen goods.
Two weeks later, seven men armed with handguns and a butcher’s knife burst into an apartment in Westbourne Gardens, Paddington, demanding money from an Emirati couple and a friend.
Only the sound of a passing sirens cut short the ordeal, and the gang fled with cash and bank cards. This case remains unsolved.
In light of those two crimes, London has a lot riding on Mr Chishty’s message.
The value to the UK of visitors from the UAE and other Arabian Gulf countries is out of all proportion to the size of the region’s population.
Over the past decade the number of visits has more than doubled and last year there was a record number of 590,000 visits from GCC countries, 262,000 of which were by Emiratis. Spending is also at an all-time high: £527 million (Dh3.31 billion) by Emiratis and £1.6bn by all GCC visitors combined.
It is too early to say if April’s attacks will have had any impact on the figures for the whole year.
UK tourist organisation Visit Britain’s figures show that between January and April, the number of visits by UAE nationals increased by 11 per cent compared with the same period last year.
Whether the attacks were coincidence or not, the police are taking no chances, said Mr Chishty.
“We have reviewed our policing plans,” he said. “We’ve got mobile patrols in those areas, so there’s a high visibility of police cars in and around those areas.
“We have a strong presence from our neighbourhood teams and we also have officers working in plain clothes dealing with an array of issues at street level.
“We also profile the days and the time when places get busy, and we’re especially aware of the locations around our more attractive visitor spots, such as big department stores and iconic destinations in central London.”
Last week, Mr Chishty hosted the first of what he said would be quarterly meetings at New Scotland Yard with representatives of the embassies of the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, “so we can get a better understanding of the needs of visiting communities.
“I know, for example, that after Ramadan and Eid it will become busy again and we will run policing operations around that to make sure people visiting London feel as safe as they can at all times.”
Maj Mohamed Al Breiki, police attache to the UAE Embassy in London, said: “In the first two or three weeks after the incidents we had many calls and emails, but we assured them these were isolated incidents that could have happened to anyone, and were not targeted at UAE nationals.”
Maj Al Breiki added that Islamaphobia was not a factor in the attacks, he believed, nor in London in general.
“I have been here six years and I have never experienced any prejudice,” he said. “London is a multinational city and we have never seen any evidence of attacks or trouble in the UK for Emiratis because we are Muslim.”
But such efforts to reassure Middle East visitors to the UK suffered a shocking setback on June 17, when a Saudi Arabian woman in her thirties was stabbed to death in a frenzied attack in broad daylight in Colchester, a town 80 kilometres to the north-east of London, where she was studying at the University of Essex.
Detectives, who have yet to solve the case, believe Nahid Almanea may have been targeted because she was a Muslim. At the time of the attack she was wearing her customary headscarf and abaya.
The Twitter hashtag #London_Is_Not_Safe, created after April’s attacks, erupted into life again, showing that the fears of GCC citizens about travelling to London are real and will take time and good work from the Met to diminish.
newsdesk@thenational.ae