A gang of youths beat to death a 16-year-old Qatari student in a British seaside town in what police say is a racist attack.
Postmortem results were expected today after Mohammed Al-Majed died in London’s King’s College Hospital on Sunday night from severe head injuries two days after he and his friends were assaulted outside a takeaway in Hastings on the south coast of England. Police are treating his death as murder.
Al-Majed had spent five weeks in Hastings studying English at the EF International Language School. He had been due to return home next week.
Al-Majed and his friends were set upon as they left a social club shortly before midnight on Friday. They were beaten, kicked and pelted with glass bottles by a group of hooded youths, who stamped repeatedly on the 16-year-old’s head before leaving him for dead.
His roommate, Majd Al-Ghannamah, 19, who suffered a black eye, said the assailants chanted racist abuse during the attack. “They called me Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. We just wanted to get away, get home, but they attacked and we couldn’t get away,” he said.