English Teenager Jailed After Trying To Behead Kurdish Barber With An Axe

We caught a bit of flak on Facebook for sharing too many stories about the Sudanese migrant who tried to behead a guy in Belfast, so here’s one from ‘the other side’ – an English teenage neo-Nazi who tried to behead a Kurdish barber. Deport her! Oh, wait..

Alina Burns, 19, of Lynton Road in Bristol, admitted attempting to murder Mohammed Mahmoodi, 27, outside a barber’s shop in Bedminster, Bristol, in 2025.

Burns snuck up on Mahmoodi outside BHK Barber and swung an axe at his neck.

Fortunately, Mahmoodi was able to fight off and disarm the teenager, but sustained a scar on his neck which he says is a “daily reminder that I was nearly killed”.

Not to mention the psychological trauma of having someone literally try to take your head off with an axe in broad daylight. In the country that you fled to for asylum, no less!

Local police patrolling nearby detained Burns immediately. She was found carrying an axe, a scalpel, and two darts.

Bristol Crown Court heard that Burns was deeply entrenched in extreme right-wing, neo-Nazi ideologies.

She used Telegram to contact the far-right group Patriotic Alternative. She wrote an email titled “The Dawn of Civil War” and sent a message stating she wanted to “kill all Jews and Muslims in Britain.”

Days before the attempted beheading, she searched online for how to use an axe and researched white supremacist mass shooters. Police later uncovered Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries at her home.

Though Burns pleaded guilty to attempted murder and possession of bladed articles, she denied a specific terrorism charge. However, the judge, Mrs. Justice Lambert, officially ruled that the attack was entirely terrorist-motivated. Seems fair, really.

It also transpired that five months before the attack, a user on a dating app reported Burns’s violent threats to the authorities. Counter Terrorism Policing admitted it was a mistake to pass the report back to local police rather than opening an investigation, as they did sweet F-all about it.

Her dad, Luke Burns, publicly blamed systemic failures by mental health services and the police. He claimed the family was never notified of her radicalisation and noted that Burns – who is autistic and struggles with anorexia – had been abandoned by education and youth services.

Burns was sentenced to 19 and a half years in prison and will serve a minimum of 15 years and six months, so at least they put her away before she managed to kill someone. Obviously more needs to be done to prevent others like her from committing acts like this and spreading their ideology.

Unfortunately, the Belfast knifeman was considerably more successful in his attack, managing to blind and severely injure his victim Stephen Ogilvie. It turns out the poor guy had already been the victim of violent trauma many years earlier.