April 08, 2007	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 19, 1428

LONDON, April 7: A 14-year-old boy was knifed to death and a young mother-to-be fatally shot in her home, London police said on Saturday, amid fears that the city's knife and gun culture is spiralling out of control.

Paul Erhahon, 14, was attacked by youths in the foyer of a tower block in Leytonstone, northeast London, on Friday evening.

He and a wounded 15-year-old friend, who is still fighting for his life in hospital, staggered from the scene of the attack and were found bleeding heavily in a nearby street by his mother, the BBC reported.

“She lifted his shirt to show me and there was blood all over him. He must have been trying to get home to his mum,” neighbour Elizabeth Chapkins told the BBC.

“She was saying: ‘We came to this country for a better life, we didn't come here for this’.” Erhahon died later in hospital. Two teenagers aged 13 and 19 are being questioned over the death, although police believe that up to 15 youths have been involved.

Police are keeping an open mind about possible links to gangs.

Erhahon is the eighth teenager to be killed in London in the last three months. Five were stabbed and three shot.

On the other side of the city on Friday, 22-year-old Krystal Hart, who was pregnant with her first child, was shot twice in the head in her flat in the southwestern neighbourhood of Clapham.

Police initially believed she was killed in a row over a parking spot, but are now investigating links to a long-running neighbourhood dispute which prompted Hart to install security cameras in her flat.

Police said they are looking for an unnamed white man aged between 30 and 50 over her death.

The killings are the latest bloody events to prompt concern about an apparent culture of violence in some parts of the British capital.

“Another two families devastated by knife and gun crime that is clearly out of control on the streets of Britain,” said Norman Brennan of support group Victims of Crime Trust.

“Unless the government introduces effective measures, these types of stabbing and shootings will continue to be commonplace on the streets of Britain and add to the fear factor the country now feels in relation to crime.” Prime Minister Tony Blair has admitted there is a “specific problem within a specific criminal culture” but rejects claims that violent crime in general is on the increase.—AFP