‘It could have been me’: The Grenfell children who survived the blaze

Published

2 months ago

September 2, 2024

admin

Sixty-seven children lived in Grenfell Tower when the west London block caught fire in June 2017. Eighteen of them never got a chance to grow up.

For many of the others, the traumatic loss, anxiety and PTSD that followed the disaster has shaped their childhoods and young adult lives.

They lost friends, family and everything they owned; spent months or years in hotels; and missed valuable school time.

In the seven years since the tragedy, more than 1,000 children and young people have been treated for mental health issues, according to the NHS Health and Wellbeing Hub, set up in the wake of Grenfell.

They were traumatised by what they saw or heard from friends and family, by having to cope with the loss of a friend or a neighbour, their natural sense of safety shattered on the night of the fire.

New referrals still come in each month.

This week, the Grenfell Inquiry releases its final report into the fire that cost 72 lives.

Sky News has spoken to some of the children who survived the tragedy. These are their stories.

Luana, 19: ‘I feel guilty that I’m here living’

Luana Gomes was 12 at the time of the fire. She managed to escape, with her sister and her pregnant mother, but they were in a coma for weeks. Her baby brother, Logan, was stillborn – the youngest victim of the disaster.

Now 19 and standing at the base of the tower, Luana can’t help but smile at some of the memories.

Pointing to where their flat was on the 21st floor, she recalls looking out the window and calling out to her friends in the park below.

“Every time my friends were down there I’d shout their names. I don’t think they could hear me,” she says, laughing.

She recalls how her friend Mehdi would knock on her door and be scared of her dog: “She was so tiny and sweet but he was terrified of her, which was funny.”

Eventually Mehdi won over his fear of the dog. He died in the fire along with his sister, brother and parents. He was eight.

Luana pauses, takes a deep breath and says: “I feel a bit guilty.

“When you think about your friends and family members and neighbours – I feel guilty that I’m here living and doing all this stuff, and they didn’t get the chance to live and do the stuff they wanted to at such a young age.”

The last seven years have been difficult. She has suffered from anxiety and depression. She missed weeks of school by being in hospital, and remembers being painfully behind when she went back to the classroom.

But she has found solace in dance. This month she goes to university to study it. It’s a cliche, she says, but “dance allows me to express my feelings in a way I can’t say in words”.

She doesn’t want to speak about the little brother she lost, but shows us a message to him written years ago on the memorial wall.

The message says: “Logan. I love and miss you so, so, so much and know that your big sister is always thinking of you. RIEP Brother.”

Abem, 12: ‘It could have been me’

Abem Abraham’s memory of his first home is hazy, but he remembers watching the tower burn, and he remembers the best friend he lost.

As the fire raged, four-year-old Abem was taken down the smoke-filled stairs by his parents – then to a friend who lived nearby. He was safe.

But before falling asleep that night, he looked out of the curtains.

“I see a tall building block engulfed in flames. I don’t know what it was,” he recalls all these years later.

“And then later I realised that it was my own home.”

The cruellest part of the tragedy was losing his best friend, five-year-old Isaac Paulos.

“He was my best friend from my school at the time,” he says. “He was a bit older than me, like a brother. Like a big brother.”

Abem is a kind, smart and energetic boy who loves Formula One, basketball and football. He plays a Manchester United song on the piano, and proudly shows me his new PlayStation 5 – a present from his uncle for having done well at school.

But this 12-year-old also has a message for the politicians and developers.

“They need to remove the cladding off of every UK building because that cladding is deadly. When it comes to fire, it can destroy houses within minutes, within hours, like it did to Grenfell. Everyone, please, please remove it.”

He wants the children who died to be remembered for their “bright dreams”.

“One of them wanted to be a footballer, wanted to be an engineer, wanted to be an architect. All gone in one flame,” he says.

“It could have been me.”

Ines, 23: ‘I was known as Grenfell girl’

As her family ran from the burning building soon after the fire started, 16-year-old Ines Alves grabbed her textbooks.

The next morning, with her home a smouldering ruin, she sat her chemistry GCSE exam.

In the days after the tragedy that destroyed her home, Ines became known as “Grenfell girl”. She has spent much of the past years trying to escape that title.

Initially, she was a viral inspiration. In the months that followed the tragedy, she gave interviews about the disaster and updates on her grades and results to eager journalists.

But it was the following year’s AS-level exams that triggered a mental health crisis.

“My biggest trauma was watching the building burning and people screaming, as I was revising for my GCSEs,” she says.

“So just revising and concentrating generally just kind of led me to dark places after that.

“When June came around it just kind of all came rushing back. And I had probably the biggest mental breakdown. It was just a horrible time.”

She ended up retaking the academic year. It was difficult seeing her friends go off to university without her – but she eventually found her own path.

For Ines, Grenfell is a story in her past, one she doesn’t want to define her future.

At university, she craved anonymity. One of her best friends didn’t realise it was her for over a year. “She just said to me, ‘that was you! What the hell?!'”

Now she’s graduated from Leeds with a degree in maths and has been travelling the world – Australia, Thailand and other parts of Asia.

“Trying to live life like a normal young adult,” she says.

“I kind of don’t really like to live life by knowing what I’m going to do in a month’s time.”

Yousra, 19: ‘They’re not just numbers’

Yousra Cherbika is angry. She’s angry about the fire, the friends she lost, the home she can never return to – and the way she feels other children and young people were treated after the disaster.

She was 12 years old when she watched the tower burn, desperately calling her friend Nur Huda who lived inside to “get out”. But she couldn’t, and her whole family perished.

“They’re not just numbers. They’re not just ‘part of 72’,” she says.

“They have names, we love them. They had stories to tell. They had full lives which were cut short.”

Yousra and her family lived on Grenfell Walk, at the base of the tower. Less is known about those residents who managed to escape, but they also lost everything in the disaster.

“There’s parts of my childhood that I just block out and I don’t remember, like the year after the fire,” she says.

“I don’t remember living in a hotel. We were in one room, five of us, and my mum was pregnant.

“I had no home to go back to, no school to go back to. And even when we did go back to school, it was different, because there were empty chairs in our classrooms.”

She feels as though their support as ‘Walk’ residents was much worse.

“We didn’t know what we were entitled to at first, and so many people turned us away.”

Today Yousra is a campaigner, a leader among local young people, volunteering in her spare time.

She is also training to be a primary school teacher, inspired by the form tutor who helped her through her lowest, darkest points in secondary school.

“I just stayed in bed and I just didn’t go into school. But she encouraged me. She motivated me.”

She feels outraged that seven years on, there is still cladding on buildings across the country.

“Why does it take 72 people to die for them to even think, oh, ‘maybe we should take cladding that might kill people?’

“And still, they haven’t done that.”

Watch Sky News’ special programme on Grenfell tonight at 8pm.

UK

Five people guilty in case of mistaken-identity double murder of teenage boys

Published

8 hours ago

November 15, 2024

admin

Five people guilty in case of mistaken-identity double murder of teenage boys

Four teenagers and a 45-year-old man have been found guilty of murdering two boys, aged 15 and 16, who were attacked with machetes in a case of mistaken identity.

The convictions follow a five-week trial at Bristol Crown Court.

The jury heard how Max Dixon and Mason Rist were killed in a case of mistaken identity on 27 January, after being wrongly identified as being responsible for a house attack in the Hartcliffe area of the city earlier that evening.

Antony Snook, 45, Riley Tolliver, 18, and three boys aged 15, 16 and 17 were all on trial each charged with two counts of murder.

As the jury foreman returned the guilty verdicts, none of the defendants showed any reaction from the dock, as they sat impassively and stared straight ahead.

The fatal stabbings in Knowle West lasted just 33 seconds – with both boys suffering what the court heard were “unsurvivable” injuries and “instant severe blood loss”.

Both died in hospital in the early hours of 28 January.

Detective Superintendent Gary Haskins, the case’s senior investigating officer from Avon and Somerset Police, told Sky News that Max and Mason had nothing to do with the house attack.

“Those boys were not known to their attackers, they were best friends, two beautiful children just going about their lives and attacked for no reason whatsoever,” he said.

Much of the prosecution’s case was based on CCTV and doorbell videos, including a camera on Mason’s own house which captured footage of the knife attack against him.

The pair were seen leaving Mason’s home at around 11.15pm and were going for a pizza.

Prosecutor Ray Tully KC told the jury that the boys were set upon by the group who had been travelling in Snook’s Audi Q2.

He said the group were “out for revenge”, “acting as a pack” to hunt down those responsible and “tooled up” with fearsome weapons.

After the attackers fled, Max and Mason were left bleeding in the street.

The investigation involved more than 230 police officers and staff – with thousands of pieces of evidence analysed.

Hundreds mourned victims at school

The teenage victims were in year 11 together at the Oasis Academy John Williams secondary school and were preparing to sit their GCSEs this summer.

The school’s headteacher Victoria Boomer-Clark told Sky News that everyone rallied to support fellow pupils and staff.

She said: “After the boys were tragically murdered, for us first and foremost we were thinking about the families and how they were coping with the absolute tragedy and shock of that.

“I can remember trying to prepare for that Monday morning and my memories now are how exceptionally strong our young people are and how we have a real sense of community.

“Unbeknownst to us the young people had arranged to hold a vigil on the playground during breaktime on that first Monday. We had hundreds of young people and staff coming together in silence.”

Ms Boomer-Clark said the boys would have attended school prom this summer.

“We had a wall that was lit up in red for Mason and Liverpool football club and a wall in blue for Park Knowle Football Club,” she said. “The year group came together and supported each other through it.”

Detective had never seen ‘horrific’ weapons before

The murders came before a new law was introduced banning ownership of zombie-style knives and machetes.

Detective Superintendent Gary Haskins said: “The weapons used in the attack on Mason and Max were simply horrific.

“I’ve been a detective for many, many years and I’ve had the misfortune of investigating some serious offences.

“In all my service I’ve not seen a weapon like the one we saw used on those two boys.

“There is no place for a weapon of that type in society for any reason whatsoever.”

The detective praised the boy’s families, who attended court throughout the trial.

He added: “I’m humbled by the families involved in this investigation. They’ve been at court every day, they’ve seen things at court that no parent should ever be exposed to. They saw the attacks on their children, but they maintain their dignity, their courage and their love for their family.

“How can you replace what they’ve lost? They’ve lost two beautiful sons, and I can only hope that the verdicts will bring some form of closure. It will never close completely.”

Snook will be sentenced on 19 November at Bristol Crown Court.

The other four defendants will be sentenced on 16 December following the preparation of pre-sentence reports.

Police are continuing to investigate the Hartcliffe house attack and search for those responsible.

UK

UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September – slower than expected

Published

10 hours ago

November 15, 2024

admin

UK economy grows by 0.1% between July and September - slower than expected

The UK economy grew by 0.1% between July and September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

However, despite the small positive GDP growth recorded in the third quarter, the economy shrank by 0.1% in September, dragging down overall growth for the quarter.

The growth was also slower than what had been expected by experts and a drop from the 0.5% growth between April and June, the ONS said.

Economists polled by Reuters and the Bank of England had forecast an expansion of 0.2%, slowing from the rapid growth seen over the first half of 2024 when the economy was rebounding from last year’s shallow recession.

And the metric that Labour has said it is most focused on – the GDP per capita, or the economic output divided by the number of people in the country – also fell by 0.1%.

Reacting to the figures, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: “Improving economic growth is at the heart of everything I am seeking to achieve, which is why I am not satisfied with these numbers.

“At my budget, I took the difficult choices to fix the foundations and stabilise our public finances.

“Now we are going to deliver growth through investment and reform to create more jobs and more money in people’s pockets, get the NHS back on its feet, rebuild Britain and secure our borders in a decade of national renewal,” Ms Reeves added.

The sluggish services sector – which makes up the bulk of the British economy – was a particular drag on growth over the past three months. It expanded by 0.1%, cancelling out the 0.8% growth in the construction sector.

The UK’s GDP for the most recent quarter is lower than the 0.7% growth in the US and 0.4% in the Eurozone.

The figures have pushed the UK towards the bottom of the G7 growth table for the third quarter of the year.

It was expected to meet the same 0.2% growth figures reported in Germany and Japan – but fell below that after a slow September.

The pound remained stable following the news, hovering around $1.267. The FTSE 100, meanwhile, opened the day down by 0.4%.

The Bank of England last week predicted that Ms Reeves’s first budget as chancellor will increase inflation by up to half a percentage point over the next two years, contributing to a slower decline in interest rates than previously thought.

Announcing a widely anticipated 0.25 percentage point cut in the base rate to 4.75%, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) forecast that inflation will return “sustainably” to its target of 2% in the first half of 2027, a year later than at its last meeting.

The Bank’s quarterly report found Ms Reeves’s £70bn package of tax and borrowing measures will place upward pressure on prices, as well as delivering a three-quarter point increase to GDP next year.

UK

Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is ‘growing in popularity’

Published

10 hours ago

November 15, 2024

admin

Meeting the deeply radical anti-tax group that is 'growing in popularity'

“If you are a member of something, it means you’ve accepted membership. Anything with ‘ship’ on the end, it’s giving you a clue: it’s telling you that’s maritime law. That means you’ve entered into a contract.”

This isn’t your standard legal argument and it is becoming clear that I am dealing with an unusual way of looking at the world.

I’m in the library of a hotel in Leicestershire, a wood-panelled room with warm lighting, and Pete Stone, better known as Sovereign Pete, is explaining how “the system” works. Mr Stone is in his mid-50, bald with a goatee beard and wearing, as he always does for public appearances, a black T-shirt and black jeans.

With us are six other people, mainly dressed in neat jumpers. They’re members of the Sovereign Project (SP), an organisation Mr Stone founded in 2020, which, he says, now has more than 20,000 paying members.

As arcane as this may sound, it represents a worldview that is becoming more influential – and causing problems for authorities. Loosely, they’re defined as “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land”.

Their fundamental point is that nobody is required to obey laws they have not specifically consented to – especially when it comes to tax. They have hundreds of thousands of followers in the UK across platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Telegram.

Increasingly, they are coming into conflict with governments and the law. Sovereign citizens have ended up in the High Court in recent months, challenging the legalities of tax bills and losing on both occasions.

In October, four people were sentenced to prison for the attempted kidnapping of an Essex coroner, who they saw as acting unlawfully. The self-appointed “sheriffs” attempted to force entry to the court, one of them demanding: “You guys have been practising fraud!”

The Sovereign Project is not connected to any of those cases, nor does it promote any sort of political action, let alone violence.

Instead, they are focused on issues like questioning the obligation to pay taxes, as Mr Stone explains, referencing the feudal system that operated in the Middle Ages.

“Do you know about the feudal system when people were slaves and were forced to pay tax?” he asks.

“Now, unless the feudal system still operates today, and we still have serfs and slaves, then the only way that you can pay taxes is to have a contract, you have to agree to it and consent to it.”

Another member, Karl Deans, a 43-year-old property developer who runs the SP’s social media, says: “We’re not here to dodge tax.”

Local government tends to be a target beyond just demands for tax. Mr Stone speaks of “council employee crimes”.

I ask whether, considering the attempted kidnapping in Essex, there is a danger that people will listen to these accusations of crimes by councils and act on them.

“Well that’s proved,” Mr Stone says. “We only deal with facts.”

Evidence suggests this approach is becoming an issue for councils across the UK, as people search online for ways to avoid paying tax.

Sky News analysis shows that out of 374 council websites covering Great Britain, at least 172 (46%) have pages responding to sovereign citizen arguments around avoiding paying council tax. They point out that liability for council tax is not dependent on consent, or a contract, and instead relies on the Local Government Finance Act 1992, voted on by Parliament.

But the Sovereign Project’s worldview extends beyond council tax. It is deeply anti-establishment, at times conspiratorial. Stone suggests the summer riots may have been organised by the government.

“The sovereign fraternity operates above all of this,” he says. “We look down at the world like a chessboard. We see what’s going on.”

He explains that, really, the UK government isn’t actually in control: there is a shadow government above them.

“These are the people who control government,” he explains.

“A lot of people say this could be the crown council of 13, this could be a series of Italian families.”

Professor Christine Sarteschi, an expert in sovereign citizens at Chatham University, Pittsburgh, says she’s worried about the threat sovereign citizens may pose to the rule of law, especially in the US where guns are readily available.

“The movement is growing and that’s evidenced by seeing it in different countries and hearing about different cases. The concern is that they will become emboldened and commit acts of violence,” she says.

“Because sovereigns truly believe in their ideas and if they feel very aggrieved by, you know, the government or whomever they think is oppressing them or controlling them… they can become emotionally involved.

“That emotional involvement sometimes leads to violence in some cases, or the belief that they have the power to attempt to overthrow a government in some capacity.”

Much of this seems to be based on an underlying and familiar frustration at the state of this country and of the world.

Mr Stone echoes some of the characteristic arguments also made by the right, that there is “two-tier policing”, that refugees arriving in the UK are “young men of fighting age”, that the government is using “forced immigration to destroy the country”.

Another SP member, retired investment banker David Hopgood, 61, says: “I firmly believe it is the true Englishman – and woman – of this country – that has the power to unlock this madness that’s happening in the West.

“We’ve got the Magna Carta – all these checks and balances. We just need to pack up, go down to Parliament and say: It’s time to dismiss you. You’re not fit for purpose.”

The members of the Sovereign Project are unfailingly patient and polite in explaining their understanding of the world.

But there is no doubt they hold a deeply radical view, one that is apparently growing in popularity.