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Who is Shukri Abdi?

Shukri Abdi was a 12-year old Somali refugee who moved to the UK in January of 2017. Her body was found on June 2019 after class bullies pushed her into a river in Bury where she drowned. Recently, #JusticeForShukriAbdi has been trending on Twitter in a call to punish the girls who murdered her.

#JusticeForShukriAbdi comes at the heels of the worldwide #BlackLivesMatter protests. In the UK, several have called attention to her case and the fact that no charges or arrests were made in connection to her murder.

Some have contrasted the largely-ignored murder of Shukri with the high-profile murder of Madeleine McCann, a white British girl who went missing 13 years ago in Portugal. This week, investigators announced that they believed McCann was dead after millions were spent searching for her kidnapper.

Initially, local police dismissed Shukri’s death as a “tragic accident.” According to a petition, Shukri’s mother said that her daughter did not know how to swim and playing near the river was “out of character.”

Earlier this year, some of Shukri’s classmates came out as witnesses and said that Shukri had been pushed around and harassed by some of her classmates shortly before she drowned.

Shukri was the oldest of five children and had immigrated to the UK after living in a refugee camp in Somalia.

“She had a beautiful personality,” Shukri’s teacher, Paul Greenhalgh said. “Always smiling, always wanting to please people and work hard.”

You can sign the petition to bring her justice here.

 


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