Messages of Support for Attacked Malaysian Student Ashraf

Hundreds of messages for Ashraf Haziq have flooded in from around the world over the last week as the public have shown their huge support for him. After the video of him being robbed became one of the iconic images of the London riots, ForeignStudents.com started a campaign to show our support, and the response has been overwhelming.

The Attack

On Monday last week, Ashraf was caught up in the riots in Barking, East London, where his plight was captured on video. The video shows him sitting dazed and bleeding on a London pavement, before it appears that he is helped up by one of the rioters. However, as he is being held up, another of the young rioters opens his rucksack, searches through it and pulls out his mobile phone and wallet, walking off with both of them.

The video was uploaded to YouTube and within 24 hours it had been viewed over a million times. The media quickly picked up on it and it was aired on all the major news channels, shocking the British public. It was soon discovered that the victim was Ashraf Haziq- a 20-year-old first year student at Kaplan International College in London, and his life has not been the same since. In the last week alone, he has met London Mayor Boris Johnson, been donated £22,000 by the public and attended numerous press conferences.

Messages of Support

After seeing the video, ForeignStudents.com started a campaign last Wednesday to collect the huge outpouring of support that Ashraf was receiving. Within just a few days, we had received hundreds of messages from people wanting to show their concern for him. You can read through many of them in the comments section of our original post here.

We gathered together a selection of these online messages as well as dozens of video messages from the public on the streets of London to create a video of support for Ashraf, which you can see below:

Thank-you so much for all your messages, it was truly overwhelming for us to read through them all, let alone for Ashraf. We are currently working on a way to get every last one of them to Ashraf, so make sure you check the blog over the coming week to stay right up to date.

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