Ten years after the death of soldier Lee Rigby, we look at the impact his murder had on the country
WORDS: FIONA FORD.
Lyn Rigby can still remember watching the news on 22 May 2013, and knowing she was looking at her son’s dead body on screen. She was at work when news emerged of a sickening terrorist attack – a soldier had been stabbed to death, in broad daylight on a London street. His bloodied body lay on the ground while his killers paraded themselves in front of the public. ‘I had an inkling it was Lee. Lee used to always phone me if there were any tragedies, just to make sure, [he’d say] ‘Mum, I’m OK,’ and I never received any phone calls,’ Lyn recalls. ‘I saw it on the big [TV] screens in the canteen at work and just the build, you know, his boots, the hoodies that he wears, because he always used to wear them... the fact that the phone call never came.’
Fusilier Lee Rigby, 25, had been off duty and wearing civilian clothes when he walked home to his army barracks in Woolwich, south-east London, only to be brutally murdered by British-born Islamist extremists, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. It’s thought they picked Lee because he was wearing a Help for Heroes sweatshirt, mowing him down in a speeding car, then stabbing him to death with a cleaver, almost beheading him in the attack.
Incredibly, Lee’s killers didn’t run away, instead they paraded the streets, seeking glory for their actions. They claimed Lee’s murder was revenge for the deaths of fellow Muslims killed by British soldiers in the Afghanistan war.
As they revelled in what they considered their finest moment they encouraged the public to film them next to Lee’s lifeless body, fully expecting to be killed by police so they could be labelled martyrs. Instead the two killers were arrested by officers, stood trial, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life in prison for their heinous crime.
Up until May 2013, the British public felt the Afghan war was fought thousands of miles from home. To see such depravity in the UK sent waves of fear through everyone, and Lee’s family really battled with their grief. Lee was an ambitious young man and an adoring father to a two-year-old son, Jack. He had joined the British army in 2006, aged 19, and went on to serve in Cyprus, Germany and Afghanistan where he spent six months in the Helmand province. ‘This was one of the greatest ironies of all – the fact that Lee had survived brutal frontline figh
