Murder in the playground: Ahmed Iqbal Ullah’s complicated legacy
It's been nearly forty years since an Asian boy was stabbed to death by his white classmate in Burnage. Whether the killing was racially motivated remains strangely contentious to this day
By Jothi Gupta
The first two weeks of class at Burnage High School in the autumn of 1986 were violent, though not any more so than usual. Boys bullied each other in the local park by school and name-called Asian students all the time. But this year, something more extreme was to come.
Darren Coulburn, a tall white boy of thirteen known for bullying other students of all races, approached a group of four Asian boys playing football in the playground on a Monday morning before school, hidden from the view of any teachers. The boys knew to expect trouble.
Coulburn took their ball and threw it on the roof, telling one of the boys he’d beat him up after class. When that student was walking home from the lower school later that day, Coulburn lay in wait by the gap between the railings of Ladybarn Park, right behind the school, and jumped him, punching him in the face and knocking him to the ground. He taunted the boy, making him stand, sit down, and say, “Sorry, master” at his instruction.
Ahmed Ullah, also thirteen, saw Coulburn shove the boy at the park. A tall, charismatic Bangladeshi teen described by his sister as a “people magnet,” Ullah was considered a leader amongst the Asian students. So, as he often did, Ullah defended his smaller, more vulnerable schoolmate, intervening in the fight and humiliating Coulburn in the process. Ullah made the bully stand and sit down, the way he had with the student he’d taunted, proving Ullah bested him.
Ullah won the battle that day, but the war wasn’t over. On Tuesday, there was chatter around the lower school about a fight in the park after class. Ullah and Coulburn met there, with classmates surrounding them to watch the showdown. Ullah initially took a hit and started to bleed, but then he lunged for Coulburn, causing him to retreat; Ullah went home victorious.
Ahmed’s mum, Fatima Ullah, saw blood on her son’s shirt and grew concerned. Ahmed insisted that it was all right to return to school. He just got new Nike trainers, and he wanted to show them off to his friends. His mother relented. She was planning to visit the school later that day to talk to Ahmed’s teachers, so she would be there should anything happen. After all, fights usually happened after school, not before.
“If only I’d insisted he didn’t go to school that day,” Fatima later told Sunday Today in a 1987 interview. “But I didn’t think it was really a threat. I thought it was just a children’s fight.”
On the way to school, Coulburn, who felt humiliated from the day before, pulled out a knife to show his friends, boasting that Ullah would meet the blade if he tried to start a fight.
On Wednesday morning, September 17, 1986, a crowd of boys gathered by the classrooms surrounding Ullah and Coulburn. Feeling newly emboldened, Ullah pushed Coulburn to the jeering of his peers. Then Coulburn bent over, pulled out a knife, and stabbed Ullah in the stomach.
One student remembers him screaming, “You want it again, Paki?”
Ullah fell to the ground, blood staining his shirt.
“I’ve just killed a Paki,” Coulburn yelled in triumph as he ran off across the campus lawn.
“It wasn’t racism”
Tucked away on the lower ground floor of Manchester’s Central Library is a small exhibition in a glass display case documenting the life and death of Ahmed Iqbal Ullah. There’s a black-and-white photo of baby Ahmed with a bowl haircut, wearing a playsuit and a curious expression. There’s a page of the novel he started writing the summer before he died, marked TOP SECRET in a large, careful hand. There are photos of protesters who took to the streets in 1987 after Ullah was stabbed to death by a white classmate on their school’s playground, holding signs reading “Death to racism” and “Ahmed’s blood will not be in vain.”
A few weeks ago, a man stumbled across the exhibition and started shouting. It was hard for Maya Sharma, a senior member of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust, who was on library duty at the time, to make out exactly what the man was saying, but here was the gist: This here says it was a racist murder. I remember, it wasn’t racist. It wasn’t. It wasn’t.
The man walked off, then looped back and kept shouting, at which point Sharma pressed the panic button beneath her desk. In the end, he didn’t have to be removed; he wandered away on his own. It all happened very fast. “I didn’t feel physically threatened,” Sharma remembers now. “It was more… it was more….” She struggles for the words. Carefully, she acknowledges that the library is a place that’s used by “so many different people,” some of whom “are having challenging lives and are in various emotional states.” This man could have just been using the archives as an excuse to lash out. But the incident nonetheless felt reflective of a very real and widespread denial “of all the kinds of systemic and institutional racism” that existed at the time of Ullah’s death — a denial “that to this day still exists.”
“The murder itself was obviously a horrific event for the family and for local communities,” Sharma says, “but it was really polarizing. There was a lot of talk about — well, a denial of the fact that it was a racially motivated attack.” When the trust took on a project in 2016 to bring Ullah’s story to a wider audience on the 30th anniversary of his death, Sharma (who didn’t work for the trust at the time) remembers seeing Facebook comments about the events denying that it was racist. “This idea that it was just playground bullying gone wrong really holds.”
The ‘loony left’
The 1980s were characterised by changing attitudes towards racism in Manchester schools. These issues played out significantly in Burnage.
Around the time of Ullah’s murder, English schools had started employing a variety of educational tactics to address racism in the classroom, all while a national campaign mobilised to reject them. That opposition had its roots in New Conservatism, galvanised by Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979.
The trope of the “loony left” began to take hold in the tabloids and within the Conservative Party itself, identifying and vilifying “social radicals”: feminists, progressive activists, anti-racists, etc. It was a term meant to criticise and belittle increasingly popular though still divisive social movements supporting minority rights and education. Thatcher openly criticised these efforts. “Children who need to be able to count and multiply are learning anti-racist mathematics — whatever that may be,” she said in a 1987 party conference speech.
Manchester was no exception to this growing division. In the summer of 1981, mounting tension eventually led to a major riot. New Conservatism brought pay rises for the police, increased use of stop and search, and less tolerance for dissent in a difficult economic environment for working-class Black Britons. All this precipitated the Moss Side riots, which in turn led Manchester City Council to acknowledge a need for policies to combat discrimination against students of colour in schools. They called it multiculturalism.
Manchester’s earliest multiculturalism policies were informed by the Rampton and Swann reports, which revealed the unequal education outcomes of immigrant students. As a result, policies on racism and anti-racist education slowly took hold in city councils and schools. It started small, first appearing as declarations that equal access to education was a priority, eventually evolving into vague recommendations that schools should enact race-conscious policies. In Manchester, for example, it was recommended that schools hire more immigrant teachers. The 1985 Swann report found that “a substantial part of ethnic minority underachievement, where it occurs, is … the result of racial prejudice on the part of society at large.”
This laid the groundwork for the first iteration of multicultural policies at Burnage High School, which got off to a very rocky start. In the early 1980s, multiculturalism’s beginnings saw black students treated as though they had “special needs.” At Burnage, Asian students were relegated to band H — the lowest band for slow learners — on account of their perceived lack of English proficiency.
‘Behave as normally as possible’
Kamal Ahmed, then a 12-year-old first-year, watched Ullah bleed out in front of him on the playground.
It was 8:45am. Seconds turned to minutes, and Ahmed’s shock gave way to concern. What was taking the ambulance so long? Ahmed joined a group of boys surrounding Ullah as he groaned and bled, facing away from him and forming a circle to prevent other students from rubbernecking. A teacher found a blanket to cover him.
The police arrived at 9am, when they checked Ullah’s injuries and radioed an ambulance. But when precious minutes continued to tick by and the ambulance still didn’t show up — due to what was later discovered as a series of miscommunications causing a more distant ambulance to come to Ullah’s aid — the police lifted the bleeding boy into a car to go to the hospital. Deputy Head Peter Moors accompanied him there. At 9:10am, nearly 40 minutes after the stabbing, Ullah arrived at the hospital.
The school released an internal statement telling teachers who thought the school day should have been cancelled to “say nothing” and to “behave as normally as possible”. So the school day continued, but unsurprisingly, few could focus. Teachers and students alike were in shock. Kamal Ahmed couldn’t unsee what he had just witnessed — a scene that would haunt him every time he passed the spot where Ullah lay dying in the playground. 38 years later, he looks into the distance while recalling the details to me on the ground floor of the Greater Manchester Bangladeshi Association in Longsight, as if he is reliving the scene all over again.
At 9:10am, the Ullah family received a phone call from the school: there had been an incident, and they needed to go to the hospital. It's unclear how much detail they were given, but the family wasn’t informed how serious Ullah’s injury was. At the time, the family didn’t have a car, so they called a taxi to take Fatima and Ullah’s father to the hospital.
After two more calls, recieved by Ullah’s older sister, Selina Ullah, they started to worry. When they arrived at the hospital, she asked the receptionist about her brother's status but got no response. Selina and her sister were shown to a side room where their parents were crying. It was then that her parents told them what happened. Ahmed was dead.
Selina looks away as she tells us this. “We weren’t thinking about how it happened, just that he wasn’t there,” she says.
A fatal mistake
Darren Coulburn had a history of violence. He was the biggest boy in the form and had a reputation for aggression. He was responsible for setting the art block on fire (as part of a group that, notably, included Asian students), frequently bullied Asian boys younger than himself, stole other smaller boys’ money, and sometimes came to school drunk.
Despite this misconduct, Coulburn remained in school. There needed to be clearer-cut discipline policies and transparent communication between the governors, social workers, and headteacher. But the school never brought his actions to the governors’ attention, which proved a fatal mistake.
In the 1980s, schools across the UK were navigating school policy amidst a growing immigrant population and evolving approaches to racism. Burnage High School, an all boys’ school — today known as Burnage Academy — retained a grammar school ethos, attracting many students for its academic prestige. Selina remembers her mother fighting to get Ahmed into the school because of its academic reputation, even going through a school appeal to secure his spot.
In 1982, the school hired a new headmaster, who ended corporal punishment and implemented multicultural education policy initiatives. In Burnage, these included teaching “community languages,” such as Urdu. The school also took advantage of funding targeted at hiring staff to support and reflect students from immigrant backgrounds. Until that point, 530 students, about a third of the student population, were of “New Commonwealth and Pakistani origin,” but of the 100 or so teachers, only one was Afro-Caribbean, and one South Asian. The rest were white.
The faculty saw new hires supporting multicultural education as “spies for the headteacher,” according to a Burnage resident who remembers the culture of the school at the time. Some considered the new faculty “diversity hires,” unqualified to teach.
The aftermath
The police released a statement to the press on the day of the murder, one that came to a controversial conclusion: Ahmed’s murder was a non-racist incident. The Manchester Evening News and other local news sources published the statement, which read that “There was no evidence of any racial overtones to the killing.” Many of Ahmed’s classmates, however, disagreed.
On the day of Ahmed Ullah’s funeral, students were sent to school, where buses were arranged to take them to the funeral. Boys milled about at lunchtime after being told to assemble in the hall, waiting to get on the buses. Then a faculty member made a surprise announcement: only Asian students would go to the funeral. It was unclear where this decision came from; one source alleges the directive came from the police, while another says that the school administration made the call after hearing there would be violence from the Asian community.
This decision deepened rifts in the community, angering white and Afro-Caribbean boys who were not allowed to mourn their friend. There were activist groups distributing anti-racist literature at the service, according to attendees, but little else indicated there had been any plans for violence.
Tensions rose in Burnage, whether they were directly attributed to Ahmed’s death or not, and they eventually escalated. One student stabbed another with a butter knife at school. One teacher called students “spineless turds” and threw his keys across the room, where they hit a boy in the head. A group of Afro-Caribbean boys attacked some Asian students on the bus back home; the bus driver was attacked in the midst of it.
A group of Asian students went to the faculty to warn them that white boys were forming gangs; they were told that they could be adding to the problem by organising into groups themselves.
In March of 1987, there were rumours that a hit list targeting 12 or so white students who had been violent or aggressive toward Asian students was circulating the school. Where these rumours began is unclear, but they spread rapidly. The white boys on the list were locked in a classroom by their teachers for “protection,” according to staff at the time, until dinnertime, when they were herded into the cafeteria, the doors locked behind them. A group of Asian students surrounded the doors outside the building, trying to get in. According to Geoff Turner, a youth worker, many white students didn’t return to school for several days after that — and some didn’t return for the rest of term.
In his report, Macdonald blamed the school’s lack of explicit action following Ahmed’s murder for the incident, writing that “there was a certain inevitability about the confrontation that took place in March.”
Who was responsible?
Anti-anti-racism
Ullah was dead. Coulburn, who had been found guilty of murder when he was fourteen years old, was in jail. But the community was left reeling. To make sense of it all, Manchester City Council enlisted senior barrister Ian Macdonald and three others to undertake an inquiry. Their report was scheduled for release at a press conference on March 30, 1988, but that conference never occurred. After taking evidence for five months, 165 witnesses, 200 statements, and a survey of 900 students, the council decided the findings were too incendiary for publication. Still, the Manchester Evening News obtained the report, and on 25 April, 1988, it published every word of the concluding chapter as an eight-page exclusive: “BURNAGE: THE WHOLE STORY.”
The Macdonald report found that Coulburn was violent, unstable and antisocial and should have been taken out of school after his earlier incidents of arson and violence. It concluded that Coulburn did not murder Ullah explicitly because he was Asian — but if he had been white, Ahmed would probably still be alive.
It found no evidence that any specific actions taken at Burnage created the circumstances that led to his murder. The subsequent violence and tension in March 1987, however, were deemed a direct result of the school mishandling the tragedy.
Macdonald rejected the claim that anti-racist policies were to blame for Ullah’s death; in fact, they should have been more robust. “An effective anti-racist policy should have eliminated that climate and the issue of violence in general and racial violence in particular,” MacDonald wrote. But in the press, and in the national consciousness, the story became that Burnage’s extreme anti-racism policies had led to Ahmed’s death.
“Anti-racist policy led to killing,” read one headline in The Daily Telegraph. The Independent’s education editor claimed that Ullah’s murder showed “anti-racist” education was a “disaster.”
The panel, attempting to clarify its findings in the face of media misrepresentation, released a statement they called “Putting the Record Straight.” They concluded that “an effective anti-racist policy should have eliminated that climate,” but the statement was never widely published by national media.
The growing narrative criticising anti-racism education only added to a belief that immigrant students were reducing the quality of “English” education. Headlines in two May 1987 issues of The Sun read: “James, 7, can’t read, got curry for lunch and talked Indian,” and “Boy who can only count in Punjabi.”
All these years later, how have schools evolved? Maya Sharma, the senior member of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust, says that she’s spoken with “teachers who are who are quite confident in teaching global histories and creating a really representative and anti-racist curriculum,” but for others, there’s “a huge lack of confidence” when it comes to these topics.
“There's a really strong sense that we need to teach a diverse curriculum that everybody, regardless of their ethnicity and their family heritage, needs to understand multicultural Britain — why we are the way we are,” she says. “What teachers feel uncomfortable about is how to do that, especially at a time when young people are getting really affected by, you know, Andrew Tate and influencers like him, those attitudes towards women and gender, Islamophobic narratives, and so on.”
‘You have to carry on living’
Today, Ladybarn Park looks very different. Behind a creaking metal gate is a park dotted with benches and mini forests of trees. The “Friends of Ladybarn Park” board is empty, and headphone-wearing runners sprint along the perimeter trail. On a recent visit, I found myself wondering where Ullah’s and Coulburn’s first encounter happened. Was it where the entrance gate creaks open? Was it where the hilltop rises? Was it at the bend where the path veers left?
What history does a place hold when everything has been buried away?
When Ullah died, Selina and her sister took charge of the family. They kept their parents “watered and fed.” But grief takes a toll. On several occasions, Ahmed’s and Selina’s father was hospitalised around the anniversary of his son’s death. The first time it happened, he had a heart attack. He was in hospital for nine of the 10 anniversaries he lived to see. He died 12 years after his son.
I ask Selina if she blames anyone for her brother’s death. She grimaces. I told her at the start of the interview that she could choose not to answer any questions she wasn’t comfortable with. But she decides to answer this one.
“It's a place we’ve really tried not to go to, because if you do that, it's really hard to move on,” she says. She didn’t think she would ever come to accept that her brother was dead, but all she could do was move forward and, for her sanity, keep busy. “You have to carry on living.”
Ahmed’s story is well known in Burnage, but it never had the national impact of other acts of racial violence, such as the murders of Stephen Lawrence or Shukri Abdi. Aside from the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Archives tucked into the Manchester Central Library and the findings of the Macdonald Inquiry, which was published in book form in 1989 as Murder in the Playground, there is little mention of him in historical narratives, despite the Ullah family’s persistent efforts to memorialise him in the education trust and archives, while also opening a school in Bangladesh in his name. Ahmed’s murder was never considered a national “flashpoint” in race relations.
Aside from a brief social media presence on the 30th anniversary of his death, there's no mention of him on the Burnage Academy website. (The school did not respond to our requests for comment.) There’s no significant memorial for him at the Bangladeshi Association in Longsight, and there is no plaque in his memory in the park where the first fight broke out.
While visiting Burnage, I stopped by the local library. When I asked the librarians about Ahmed Ullah, it took them a moment to register what I was talking about, and then: “Oh, that boy that was stabbed?” “That was a while ago, wasn’t it?”
Ahmed’s tragedy held water for a national political narrative, but not so much for the story of an Asian boy who was known to stand up to violence and taunting, for which he paid the ultimate price.
“People might not know his name,” says Selina, “but it's there, part of the fabric of Manchester.”
Additional reporting by Shannon Keating. You can find more information about the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust here.
Thank you for this. It brought it all back to me. And, painful though it was to revisit all that anger, it is important. Ahmed Ullah should not be forgotten.
Thank you so much for informing us who weren't aware about Ullah's tragic death. I live a couple of miles from the school, passed it on the way to work every day for years and wasn't aware of this. The attitude of the school, police and the press around this time and subsequently is quite chilling. There should at least be a plaque at the school to remember him. My heart goes out to Ullah's family and friends.