A woman had her throat slashed and was then thrown into a river in Clifden this week and most of the reports around the horror of the death inflicted on this beautiful young mother are carefully ignoring the elephant in the room.
The woman, Masuma Sohrabi, had two children – a five year old girl and a nine year old boy – and was known locally as Athija. She had come to Ireland from Iran. She was living in an IPAS centre – a former B&B known as Waterloo House – in Conamara. The man who led Gardaí to her body, saying that he had killed her, is a foreign national and was also living in an IPAS centre.
When questioned as to the whereabouts of the missing woman, it is understood the man admitted he had attacked and killed her the night before before throwimg her body in a local river, reports said today. The suspect had inflicted a non-life-threatening wound on himself and is being treated in hospital.
One source told Gript that Masuma Sohrabi had her throat slashed and had almost been decapitated. It is also understood that she had previously reported the man for alleged violence in the past – and he had been removed from the IPAS centre where they both lived.
But most of the reports around the horror of what happened in Clifden played down the fact that the suspect was a foreign national and that this unspeakable violence happened around an asylum accommodation centre.
Obviously, there are reporting restrictions, and journalistic ethics are also important, but there is now an established pattern of deliberate avoidance of some of the most pertinent details around some of the most vicious and unprecedented crimes seen in this country in recent years.
And the violence is unprecedented. Yousef Palani who came here from Iraq not only murdered two gay men, Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee, in Co Sligo in April 2022, he decapitated one of them. One of the men had 43 stab wounds, while another was stabbed 25 times mainly to the head, neck and chest. Both Mr Moffitt and Michael Snee, were believed to have been contacted by Palani on the gay dating app, Grindr. He targeted them – and had 12 men on a kill list altogether.
Yet the media tried to bury the most horrific aspects of the story by insisting this was just an example of Irish homophobia. In the same way, they tried to blame Irish men and misogyny for the terrible murder of teacher Ashling Murphy, killed by a Slovak Romani – and then attacked her boyfriend Ryan Casey when he said that Ireland didn’t feel safe any more.
They distracted the country with pictures of rioters and endless fearmongering about the “far-right” after terrified children had been slashed and almost killed by a foreign national when coming out of a primary school in Parnell Square.
And when a 13-year old girl was allegedly seriously sexually assaulted in Citywest last October by a migrant, most of the media attention focused on a minority of protesters. Their analysis was taken up with by-now-customary review of social media posts, while the usual NGOs fretted about ‘far-right’ playbooks.
The locals of Saggart, who did everything right – peacefully protested, held public meetings, wrote to TDs – in opposing a massive migrant centre in their small village, were horrified and scared that their worst nightmare had come true: a child had been sexually assaulted. But the media weren’t much interested in their concerns.
Soon they will likely be telling us that ‘a Galway man’ or a ‘man living in Conamara’ has been charged with the brutal murder of a young mother who was known to him. How much more of this imported violence are we meant to just ignore?
Recently, I sat down in the Gript studio and talked to Laoise de Brún of the Women’s Coalition in Immigration to discuss the report she and journalist Barbara McCarthy had produced. The report compares official data collated by domestic police forces and government departments of six European countries that shows an overrepresentation of non-national men in sexual offence statistics.
Drawing on official statistics from multiple EU member states including Austria, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Italy, and France, the report outlines clear evidence that foreign-born individuals are over-represented in sexual offence data, often by a factor of three to four, with even higher rates in specific subcategories such as gang rape, de Brún says.
Similarly, for a Gript analysis published last year, I examined every killing of a woman in Ireland over the previous five years and found that foreign nationals have been charged or convicted of murder in disproportionate numbers, being involved in almost 1 in 3 – or 31% – of these violent deaths.
In our discussion, Laoise de Brún observed that there’s “a very tightly controlled narrative around immigration” – but there’s a “palpable sense amongst communities in Ireland that we are witnessing new types of crime”.
The people of Conamara have been left reeling by the ferocity and savagery of that new type of crime, just as the Murphy family were, the people of Sligo were, and parents in Parnell Square were. And a beautiful young woman and a mother to two young children are dead. But it wasn’t a Conamara man who visited this violence on an innocent victim, and we need to have an honest discussion about ever-escalating migrant crime.