Pavlo Lapshyn

Attacks Murder of Mohammed Saleem

At around 10 pm on 29 April 2013, five days after his arrival in the United Kingdom, Lapshyn stabbed 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem to death as he returned from Green Lane Mosque in Small Heath. Saleem, who had emigrated to the United Kingdom from Pakistan in 1957, had been walking alone near his Small Heath home when he was spotted by Lapshyn, who was carrying a knife. Lapshyn later told detectives that he decided to kill Saleem since he "was a Muslim and there were no witnesses." Lapshyn stabbed Saleem three times in the back. Shazia Khan, a daughter of Saleem, claimed that her brother had received increasingly threatening letters purporting to be from the EDL. One of them stated: "It has come to our attention that you are training terrorists at your premises. We will not tolerate any terrorist activities on our soil. We urge you to close this gym as soon as possible." The letters were said to date from September 2012, before Lapshyn's arrival.

Due to post-mortem investigations, Saleem was not given a funeral until 13 July. Approximately 5,000 attended the service at his mosque.

Bombing attempts

Lapshyn attempted three bombings on local mosques, targeting Friday lunchtimes as they are the services with highest attendance. The second was laid outside Wolverhampton Central Mosque on 28 June, but not reported until after the other two because police failed to recognise that a bomb had caused debris on a traffic island near the building until Lapshyn's arrest. Officers were called to the scene after it had detonated on Friday 28 June, but they were not specialists and did not realise the significance of the type of debris. The third bomb was placed in Tipton on 12 July and went off one hour after prayers ended, with no-one injured,

The investigation seized and examined thousands of hours of CCTV, much of it from commercial premises along the exit route and were able to pick out a suspect, going to and from the site of the last attack using the bus network. The final journey was to the Small Heath area. Images were publicly broadcast, but no-one called in to identify him. Local officers visited local premises and finally came to Delcam – where Lapshyn was identified and soon after was arrested peacefully.

Lapshyn was sentenced at the Old Bailey in London on 25 October 2013. The court was cordoned off after a suspicious device was found. Wright argued for a whole-life order; however, Lapshyn was sentenced to life in imprisonment, with a minimum term of 40 years, meaning he would not have been eligible for release until 2053.

Death Twelve years after his crimes and convictions, Lapshyn died at HMP Wakefield on 23 September 2025, at the age of 37. The cause of death has yet to be disclosed.

Legacy Lapshyn's first name and patronymic, though not his surname, were among many names of many anti-Muslim influences written on the weapons that Brenton Tarrant used during the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks.

In April 2021, to mark the eighth anniversary of Mohammed Saleem's murder, his daughter Massarrat Saleem started the social media campaign "#IAmMohammedSaleem" with the aim of getting the British government to officially recognise Islamophobia as a crime.