Man arrested after fatal stabbing of 'gentle giant'

A 19-year-old man has been arrested over the death of a teenager who was stabbed to death at a bakery shop in London.

Detectives believe Jimmy Mizen, 16, was killed in Lee, south-east London, after he refused to respond to a challenge from his attacker to have a fight.

Scotland Yard said last night that a 19-year-old man was in custody at a police station in connection with the unprovoked assault on "gentle giant" Jimmy, a 6ft 4in practising Christian. He died after being stabbed in the neck with a shard of glass just 500 metres from his home, police said.

The arrest came as the Metropolitan Police began a crackdown on knife and gun crime – including the greater use of stop and search powers – after a spate of fatalities in the capital.

Six people have died and another four have been wounded in such attacks in the past fortnight.

A man who died after a separate dispute outside a fast-food restaurant in Oxford Street was named yesterday as Steven Bigby, 22, from north London.

Police said that he had received a single stab wound to the chest.

Detectives were trawling through hundreds of images from closed circuit television cameras in an effort to identify the men involved in the fracas. They said they were working on the theory that the clash was a "spontaneous" incident, rather than being connected to gang-related crime.

It also emerged yesterday that an 18-year-old man was stabbed in the chest in Camberwell, south-east London, on Monday. The victim was taken to a London hospital where he was in a "life threatening" state. His situation later stabilised.

London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, called a summit yesterday with the capital's police chiefs amid growing alarm over the killings.

Mr Johnson said his deputy, Kit Malthouse, would meet police to agree an "immediate operational response" to the stabbings.

He said: "Everybody is shocked by the level of violence we are seeing, particularly towards young people in London."