Parsons Green "Bucket Bombers" Were "Child" Refugees

The Australian reports that "[b]oth of the 'vulnerable'’ Middle East refugees arrested over the bucket-bomb, peak-hour attack on a London Tube train were fostered by the same, generous, unsuspecting elderly couple at Sunbury-on-Thames." The two suspects are Syrian refugee Yahyah Farroukh, now 21, and an unnamed 18-year old Iraqi refugee. The article relates that "Farroukh appears to have flown to Cairo and then crossed the Mediterranean to Italy on an old fishing boat before being granted asylum as an unaccompanied child in London several years ago." The other suspect "claim[ed] to be an orphan from Baghdad and to have traversed across Europe to the Calais Jungle refugee camp."

The two men were placed with the Joneses as part of the British government’s Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement Program, a multi-million-dollar support system for 23,000 of the Syrian war’s most vulnerable that began in 2014. It provides accommodation, care, English lessons, schooling, medical support and financial subsidies.