White Supremacist Who Killed Muslim, Bombed Three Mosques Said 'Racial Hatred' Led Him to Attack

Ukrainian white supremacist Pavlo Lapshyn, who allegedly killed 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem a few days after he traveled to the United Kingdom for work, stated that "racial hatred" led him to commit murder.

Lapshyn pleaded guilty on a handful of terror charges on Monday, after he admitted to stabbing Saleem three times in the back after the grandfather was walking back to his house from evening prayers at a local mosque last April, the Telegraph reported.

Lapshyn, a student working toward his Ph.D., was described by police as a "lone wolf" terrorist who also set up three homemade bombs in front of Walsall, Wolverhampton and Tipton mosques. The 25-year-old of Ukrainian descent told authorities that he timed the explosion for 1 p.m., when people normally arrived at the Mosque. But on the day of the Tipton blast, afternoon prayers were pushed back an hour in observance of Ramadan.

The Tipton homemade bomb blasted shrapnel 200 feet around the area - had Lapshyn not fumbled on the timing of the attack, hundreds of Muslim worshippers and bystanders could have been injured, or even killed.

Police told the Telegraph that Lapshyn admitted to targeting people of Asian and Middle Eastern heritage due to "racism."

"I would like to increase racial conflict," Lapshyn said during a police interview. "I did it because they are not white and I am white. My purpose was to commit a terrorist act."

He added that he chose to detonate three bombs because he believed "a series of explosions may achieve more."

"I have a racial hatred, so I have a motivation, a racial motivation and a racial hatred," he said on April 29.

The technology student seemed "calm, calculated, committed," during the initial interviews, police officers reported. After reviewing Lapshyn's online activity, authorities discovered that the Ukrainian student had performed hundreds of online searches concerning extremist and white supremacist groups before the attacks.

Lapshyn landed in the United Kingdom five days prior to the murder, as he was working for a company called Delcam Plc in the area of Birmingham.