In Chapter Two it was noted that in early August 2005, BBC news reported that there had been a ‘six-fold’ increase in ‘religious hate crimes, mostly against Muslims’ since the bombings and attempted bombings in London in July (BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4740015.stm). But the same BBC news item reported some equivocation on the part of Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur. He stated that “there is no doubt that incidents impacting on the Muslim community have increased”, but he was also reported as saying that “the rise was partly due to the fact that faith hate crimes were now recorded separately from other racial incidents”. Echoing this view about the problem of reliability of the police ‘hate crime’ data, Metropolitan Police Authority Chairman Len Duvall reportedly stated that the classification of many previously defined racial incidents as faith incidents had produced a “large percentage increase from a very low base”. To confound the picture even further, the Hindu Forum of Britain claimed in written evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee (Hindu Forum of Britain, 2005) that Hindus and Sikhs were more vulnerable to ‘hate crime’ in London than Muslims following the July 2005 bombings, claiming that ‘Many of the instances of faith hate crime were due to mistaken identity since Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims from the Asian community look alike’. ([Mr] David Winnick MP put it more bluntly at the Home Affairs Select Committee meeting that: ‘Clearly, among certain sorts of thugs in Britain there is no distinction: they are all Pakis, so to speak, in the language of such extremists’, and as Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, said in his reply: ‘The kind of idiot that attacks a turban attacks a hijab or a yar mulke for that matter’: House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, 2005, Q70.) However, the Commissioner was rather more circumspect on the matter of the extent of incidents against Muslims, reporting that: