Lewisham stabbing: Boy, 15, knifed to death in London chicken shop

Murder is latest in string of killings across capital this year

The teenager was found with knife wounds inside this Morley's fried chicken shop in Lewisham (Google Maps)

A 15-year-old boy has been stabbed to death in a fried chicken shop in south London.

The police were called to reports of a stabbing at a Morley’s restaurant on Randlesdown Road, in the Bellingham neighbourhood of Lewisham at 5.20pm on Thursday.

When they arrived they found a teenager with knife wounds. Paramedics took the boy to a south London hospital but their efforts could not save him and he was pronounced dead at 8.15pm.

Murder detectives from the Metropolitan Police have been notified of the incident, a spokesperson for the force said.

Officers are still working to understand what exactly happened and no arrests have been made.

Photographs taken at the scene show forensic specialists in pale blue bodysuits collecting evidence and taking pictures inside the restaurant, which has been cordoned off.

The murder is the latest in a string of fatal stabbings across London this year and is part of a general rise in knife crime in England and Wales.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said last month that police recorded 39,332 knife offences, the highest number on record and an annual increase of 12 per cent, in the year to June 2018.

In the same period, overall violence rose by 19 per cent to almost 1.5 million crimes, homicide increased by 14 per cent and robbery by 22 per cent.

Knife crime was concentrated in London and other metropolitan areas, the ONS said, but most police forces had also seen a rise.

The capital has seen a surge in murders in 2018: over the summer the rate was predicted to be 28 per cent higher than in 2017 and the city’s hundredth victim was killed in September.

The last person to be stabbed to death was just a day earlier, on Wednesday, when a man in his 30s was killed at lunchtime in a park in the south-east London neighbourhood of Rotherhithe.