21 September 2020

Grieving mother urges son’s killer to come forward

21 September 2020

A grieving mother whose son’s murder is thought to have been caught on Snapchat has called for his attacker to come forward, five years after his brutal killing.

Mariama Baby Kamara’s second child Mohamed Dura-Ray was stabbed to death in Kennington, south London, on September 14 2015, the night before his mother’s 46th birthday.

She said her family has been living under the weight of a “death sentence”, and fears the 16-year-old may have been targeted after he refused to deal drugs on the orders of an older man.

Despite evidence suggesting the murder was filmed and uploaded to the social media video-sharing app Snapchat, the 16-year-old’s killers were never convicted after a key witness refused to give evidence in court.

Now, after marking the five-year anniversary of his death last week, Ms Kamara revisited the spot where Mohamed died on Monday, and appealed to those responsible to explain what happened.

She said: “The only thing that would make me feel relief is to know what happened that night. What happened?

“Because Mohamed was not the type of person who fights.

“Put me in peace with my family, just to tell the killer to come out.

“That is the only thing I want from him.”

Ms Kamara says she has not received an update from the police regarding Mohamed’s murder for over two years, and now believes he may have been groomed into selling drugs across county lines in the year before his death, after disappearing on several occasions for three to four days at a time.

She said: “Mohamed reported to me that somebody was harassing him.

Mohamed Dura-Ray (PA Media)

“He was saying to me that this person was always seen running after him.

“He was telling him to sell drugs. Mohamed told me that.

“He said before he was nice to him.

“Later, as soon as he told him to sell drugs, he was bad to him when Mohamed was refusing it.”

Ms Kamara, 51, who is originally from Sierra Leone, said she had been so traumatised by Mohamed’s death, she had fallen into depression and been unable to work.

“I can’t go to work, everything just shattered on me,” she said.

“Everything has gone upside down, because I am stressed. I am so distressed, even my daughter – all of us are stressed.

Mariama Baby Kamara at the scene of her son’s killing (PA Wire)

“We are depressed because of Mohamed’s death.

“It’s like up until now they put us in a death sentence.”

Mohamed’s older brother, Abdul Rahman Dura-Ray, 25, said the family had been “mentally drained” by his death, and described his sibling as “an energetic little boy, who always had a smile on his face”.

An inquest into Mohamed’s death in 2017 returned a conclusion of unlawful killing, following a post mortem which showed the teenager had died from a single stab wound to the heart.

Police evidence at the inquest said Mohamed had been seen crying out in pain after he was stabbed in the Newington Estate, near Elephant and Castle, less than a mile from his home in Walworth.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “The case into the murder of 16-year-old Mohamed Dura-ray remains an active and open investigation. Officers from the Met’s Homicide and Major Crime Command continue to investigate and urge anyone with any information to contact police as soon as possible on 0208 721 4622.”

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