Gang war between the ‘Moscow17’ and ‘Zone 2’ crews left teenager disembowelled after mass brawl

Too many residents on the Elmington Estate in Camberwell, South London, live behind security doors with iron bars and grilles on the windows.

They are perhaps the most visible signs of a community under siege. ‘There is nothing to be done any more,’ said one woman despairingly. ‘I just want to leave.’

She describes the neighbourhood as a ‘war zone’. It has become an overused analogy, but it genuinely applies here in SE5.

The surge in shootings and stabbings blighting almost every part of the capital culminated last week in a bloodbath in broad daylight outside the woman’s home in Landor House, a five-storey block of flats on the estate.

Police battle to save a boy that is critically injured after the ugly scenes in Camberwell 

A mass knife fight next to a children’s play area — repeat, children’s play area — involving up to 30 teenagers resulted in scenes rarely witnessed outside a terrorist atrocity or motorway pile-up. A virtual field hospital was set up to treat the wounded.

The most badly hurt were hooked up to drips and oxygen masks before being wheeled away on stretchers.

Among the casualties was a 15-year-old with injuries more commonly seen on the battlefield. He had been disembowelled and was screaming for his mother.

There is a new gangland slang word for what happened to him. He had — to use the brutal vernacular of this sociopathic sub-culture — been ‘cheffed’.

This alludes to the fact that the weapon used on him was a long-bladed knife, the kind chefs use in the kitchen to gut fish and slice through meat. The boy, we have learnt, is now off the ‘danger list’ but has sustained life-changing internal damage from being repeatedly sliced with the knife and faces months, if not years, of recovery.

A petty dispute over a belt, it was reported, was the catalyst for the carnage. But it goes much deeper than that. The youngster who was ‘cheffed’ was a member of the notorious Moscow17 crew, our inquiries have established. Such gangs appear in so-called drill rap videos, their faces covered with hoods, masks and scarves, boasting about ‘cheffing’, ‘splashing’ (stabbing an enemy repeatedly until they pour with blood) and ‘capping’ (shooting someone.)

The list of young men from this nihilistic world who have ended up on the mortuary slab is proof that these ‘lyrics’ are more than just bravado.

Moscow17 has been engaged in a vicious feud with Zone 2 from Peckham, immediately to the east of Camberwell. The rivalry between them was the real reason for the explosion of savagery on the Elmington Estate last week. It has been likened to the world depicted in the classic dystopian novel and film, A Clockwork Orange.

When Stanley Kubrick brought Anthony Burgess’s novel to the screen in the Seventies, audiences were shocked by its portrayal of ‘ultra-violence’ in a futuristic Britain.

The scene in Camberwell where emergency services respond to a mass stabbing incident

The scene in Camberwell where emergency services respond to a mass stabbing incident

The prevalence of gangs such as Moscow17 suggest that this chilling future has now arrived in London, where the recent crimewave has led to fears the police have lost control of the streets.

The statistics are frightening. The borough of Southwark, in which Camberwell falls, has the second highest level of knife crime in London; 805 incidents were recorded last year.

In June alone, according to the latest (and most localised) Home Office data, 349 crimes, including 92 ‘violent/sexual offences’ were committed within just half a mile of the Elmington Estate. This works out at around three a day.

Brian Delgado has seen dystopian London unfold, in microcosm, from the kitchen window of his maisonette at Elmington over the past few months.

He saw a group of boys, some of them still in their school uniforms, kick open the door of a nearby flat. Even when the man who lived there came out, they stood their ground, taunting and intimidating him. He saw a young girl being humiliated by another group of youths near the children’s play area. There were about eight of them. They proceeded to coat the girl in flour, then pelt her with eggs. He also witnessed the aftermath of last week’s bloodbath.

Mr Delgado, 57, was returning from the shops when he saw a ‘zombie’ knife being chucked away before someone jumped into a van.

Several knives are understood to have been found in the vicinity. Banned in the UK, they can be bought for as little as £10 online. The weapons are frequently seen in zombie apocalypse movies, hence the nickname.

Shocked neighbours said two of the teenage victims had heir stomachs cut open

Shocked neighbours said two of the teenage victims had heir stomachs cut open

Elmington resembled the set of such a movie at the height of the recent skirmish, with youths running around the blocks and jumping from first-floor balconies.

‘It was mayhem,’ says Mr Delgado. He has given a statement to the police but is reluctant to testify in court should criminal charges ensue. ‘I don’t want my home burned down,’ he adds.

Elmington is just down the road from Camberwell police station. But, these days, the station is only open for a few hours a month. Instead, it is used as a base for the safer neighbourhood team.

The once seven-strong community policing team has also been reduced to a single officer and a single PCSO (Police Community Support Officer.) It’s a familiar story. The Metropolitan Police service has seen its annual budget cut by about 20 per cent over the past decade and has lost ten per cent of officers in that time.

Still, the force’s top brass insist they have not lost control of the streets. From a flat on a desolate walkway in Landor House, it’s hard to see things that way. ‘What’s happening is not normal,’ said one mother of two teenage boys.

‘My husband saw a group of them with knives chasing each other through the block only a few weeks ago. The police did come but they had run off. Every day, 15 to 20 youngsters aged about 14 and 15, hang around the building shouting and arguing. It’s intimidating. You don’t want to walk past them.’

Yet Landor House is just a five-minute walk from tree-lined Camberwell Grove, one of London’s loveliest avenues which is lined with multi-million pound Georgian mansions.

The informal dividing line between rich and poor, between townhouses and council houses, is Camberwell Church Street, a bustling main shopping thoroughfare. The entire area is — on the surface at least — gradually becoming more gentrified.

The opening of a refurbished, better connected London Overground station at Denmark Hill in 2012 has attracted young professionals working in the City to the postcode. Apartments in new high-end developments can cost up to £825,000.

Perversely, however, in boroughs where deprivation levels are going down and property prices are rising, violent crime increased in the first five months of the year.

One factor behind this phenomenon, professional and academic observers believe, is that for many locals, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, the aspirational lifestyles on their doorstep are unattainable and this, in turn, has created a growing sense of alienation and resentment.

Such disaffection, they say, plays into the hands of gangs.

Almost all the murder victims and suspects in the recent spate of fatal stabbings and shootings in Southwark are young black men, even though only just over a quarter of Southwark’s population is described as black or black British. Gang culture is embedded on the housing estates where many local black kids grow up. Moscow17 has a stranglehold on at least two: the Elmington and Brandon, not far away in neighbouring Kennington.

Officers outside Landor House after four people were taken to hospital with stab wounds

Officers outside Landor House after four people were taken to hospital with stab wounds

Many of the youngsters glorifying violence on menacing drill footage online defy the popular stereotype. Many, according to local campaign groups, are doing well at school and come from stable family backgrounds.

Pastor Julian Khan runs the Mercy Mission charity on Brandon. Every day he patrols the estate on his bike.

One of the boys he befriended was in his early teens when he was ‘recruited’ by the gang. By the age of 16, he had left his ‘loving’ parents, who were originally from Nigeria, and was living in a so-called gang house somewhere on the estate. He was eventually rescued by Pastor Khan.

An interview he conducted with the boy, now 19, is stored on Pastor Khan’s iPad. The teenager is wearing a baseball cap and sweatshirt. His name is Michael.

Michael explains why his former way of life appeals to so many of his contemporaries and why so few are able to leave. ‘The older generation, they think you can stop picking up a knife if you want to, like it’s easy, but for many people it’s really not,’ he reveals, in a softly spoken voice.

‘Once you are in that kind of lifestyle you are too far gone. It’s sad.’

Michael continues: ‘If you try to leave, you just get pressure from your own peers, from social media . . . it’s so crazy . . . that’s why it is almost impossible for them to leave.

‘So, I think if I am being honest, it might be a bit brutal, but I just feel that the people who’re already in gangs right now, they’re just gone.

‘The people we need to focus on is the next generation, to show them that this lifestyle is not cool. That’s why everyone my age does everything to be cool, the way we dress, the way we talk, sometimes where we go to eat, we put it on Snapchat to be cool.’

Michael was punished for walking away from his former life.

He was left battered and bruised after being beaten with baseball bats. He is reunited with his parents now, has a job and is doing well.

Meanwhile, Pastor Khan, a Pentecostal minister, has often found himself in danger. Outside his flat on the Brandon estate, where he lives with his wife and young family, he shows me a crack on the front bumper of his car. ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ he says.

Another vehicle, a yellow Audi, deliberately backed into him.

He wrote down where and when the incident occurred on a scrap of paper at the time: ‘06.53 . . . 03/6/18 . . . Cooks Road . . .Audi Yellow . . . Stopped + Reversed into my car.’

Inside the Audi were five young men aged between 18 and 20. They were gang members. One of them got out of the car after the shunt. ‘It’s OK, you can go,’ he informed Pastor Khan, as if he was in charge of him.

The pastor is not sure why he was targeted. There doesn’t always have to be a reason, at least not one that makes sense to anyone outside the fold.

Many of the drill videos are filmed on the Brandon estate.

Pastor Khan points to an alleyway near his home where a group of youths in balaclavas, in the process of filming, were about to be set upon by rivals armed with knives.

Eyewitness revealed how man holding machete was screaming 'I want my belt back' at rivals

Eyewitness revealed how man holding machete was screaming ‘I want my belt back’ at rivals

He saw them approaching and intervened. ‘No bloodshed — not in my neighbourhood,’ he declared. The youths dispersed. The ever-growing death toll tells us it doesn’t always end this way.

Pastor Khan points to a tower block near where we are standing. ‘That’s where Rhyhiem lived,’ he says.

He is referring to Rhyhiem Ainsworth Barton, who was a member of Moscow17.

He was shot dead in May. Gunshots were heard in Cooks Road, where Pastor Khan’s car was reversed into, but Rhyhiem, who was 17, was found on Warham Street, a few minutes from Elmington.

In the same street, a few yards away, bouquets have been left on the pavement.

In the middle is a photograph of a smiling, smartly dressed young man staring out from a Metropolitan Police poster appealing for information about his murder. Sidique Kamara, 23, was fatally stabbed at this spot on August 1. Like Rhyhiem, he was a drill rapper with Moscow17.

Last month, Latwaan Griffiths, 17, died after a moped driver dropped him, bleeding from knife wounds, outside King’s College Hospital in Camberwell. He was a member of Harlem Spartans, a group which collaborated with Moscow17.

So, in the past few months alone, two teenagers and a young man have been killed and around six others that we know of, have been stabbed on the Elmington and Brandon housing estates in South London.

The individuals who inhabit this world are on an almost permanent war footing. The following encounter, again in Camberwell, epitomises this.

When police pulled over a taxi in the early hours recently, they found two men, aged 18 and 19, with a samurai sword and a loaded, cocked revolver. One of the teens was wearing ballistic body armour.

People who work in this field say youngsters caught up in the violence are at risk of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

The estate in south east London is becoming a 'warzone' and more like the Bronx in New York

The estate in south east London is becoming a ‘warzone’ and more like the Bronx in New York

‘Carrying weapons, running and being chased, exposure to people being wounded and dying, constantly being hyper-alert for possible armed conflict, these are exactly the same things that give soldiers PTSD,’ said Mark Webb, chairman of Camberwell Green Safer Neighbourhood ward panel. It is a view shared by many youth workers and academics who found that gang members are often traumatised and fearful, and that some of the most vulnerable are frequently the most dangerous.

Fuelling the turf wars are those ever-present videos glamorising the most stomach-churning savagery.

Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick says social media companies have a responsibility to society to remove them from the internet.

But they remain. Former BBC radio DJ Tim Westwood even featured Moscow17 on his video channel, calling the group ‘legendary’.

On one track, Moscow17 urges members of rival Zone 2 to ‘check the scoreboard’ — count the number of stabbings — and asks ‘How you gonna make it even?’

Back on the Elmington Estate, just round the corner from the scene of last week’s mass knife fight, is where, until very recently, Kevin Aka-Kadjo used to live. His mother works for a children’s school, his father is a security guard.

Their son was jailed for 14 months this week. He was a member of Moscow17.

Aka-Kadjo, who is 19, was caught driving around London with a fearsome hunting knife.

‘There are concerns expressed rightly in the pre-sentence report I have read about you,’ the judge told him.

‘You are described as someone who is unconcerned about your behaviour.’

It is the kind of sociopathic mentality which explains why many believe the police have now lost control of the streets.

 

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