LONDON — Nabeer Bakurally's short life came to an end on a chilly, inky night in November, on a street in East London.
The 19-year-old was out late with a friend when a group of young men attacked them, possibly after some kind of dispute. There was a lethal glint of metal, and minutes later Bakurally lay bleeding on the sidewalk, stabbed in the heart.
His death added to a grim roll call of fatal knife attacks in Britain in 2008, possibly the worst such year on record. In a country where guns are strictly controlled and shootings are much rarer than in the United States, the surge in stabbings has propelled the issue of knife crime to the top of the public safety agenda.
Like Bakurally, many of the victims have been teenagers, including Robert Knox, an aspiring actor who had won a minor role as a student wizard in the film "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" due out this year. Knox, 18, died from multiple stab wounds in May after trying to protect his younger brother from an attacker outside a bar in southern England.
The Labor government is now talking of a zero-tolerance policy for anyone caught carrying a knife, a stance with which the opposition Conservatives agree. But that has not stopped the issue from becoming a political blame game featuring accusations of lying and replays of a popular public debate over whether British society is "broken."
Last week the Conservatives released statistics that they say show a record number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales last year -- five a week, on average, or a 30% increase since Labor came to power in 1997.
"It is quite shocking to think that these numbers are the highest since they started recording these sorts of incidents back in 1977," James Brokenshire, an opposition spokesman on public safety issues, told the British Broadcasting Corp. "It does paint this picture of knife crime having increased and the measures that the government has tried to introduce not being effective."
Among those measures is a special police operation against knife crime in 10 problem areas, including London, where more than 85 people were stabbed to death last year. It empowers police to conduct spot checks and monitor how easily minors can buy knives in shops, which is illegal here.
