Home Secretary Meeting Police Over Knife Crime

4 March 2019, 09:35 | Updated: 4 March 2019, 09:36

Sajid Javid will meet police chiefs to discuss violent crime amid a series of brutal stabbings around the country.

The Home Secretary and Bromsgrove MP will chair the Chief Constables roundtable following the high-profile deaths of two 17-year-olds.

The event on Wednesday will include police chiefs from the areas most affected by knife crime.

It comes after the fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Jodie Chesney in an east London park on Friday night in what her family branded a "totally random and unprovoked attack".

It was the 18th homicide in the capital in 2019, a total that stood at 20 by the end of the weekend.

A 17-year-old boy who was stabbed to death in the village of Hale Barns, near Altrincham, in Greater Manchester, on Saturday night was named by police as Yousef Ghaleb Makki.

Also over the weekend, a man was charged with murder over the fatal stabbing of Che Morrison, 20, outside an east London railway station on Tuesday.

A man was arrested in connection with two stabbings in central London late on Saturday night and early on Sunday that left two people with life-threatening injuries.

And police named a man who is fighting for his life after a "horrific attack" when he was stabbed in Enfield, north London, on Tuesday.

The incidents follow three teenagers dying in knife attacks in two weeks in Birmingham, leading to West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson branding it a "national emergency".

Hazrat Umar, 17, was killed in Bordesley Green on Monday; Abdullah Muhammad, 16, died in Small Heath the previous week, and seven days earlier Sidali Mohamed, 16, was stabbed outside a college in Highgate.

Mr Javid said: "Young people are being murdered across the country and it can't go on.

"We're taking action on many fronts and I'll be meeting police chiefs this week to hear what more can be done.

"It is vital that we unite to stop this senseless violence."