Two men are on trial in London for a horrific killing which left the victim’s guts “spilling out of his belly”.

Ezra Abeka-Soares, of Caxton Road, Southall, Middlesex, and Morgan Mockford, of Randolf Road, Walthamstow, are said to have cycled up to 17-year-old victim Elijah Dornelly and a friend and ambushed them on the street in May 2017, MailOnline reports.

“Elijah Dornelly’s friend managed to escape and run away, but Elijah Dornelly was not so fortunate,” said prosecutor Jonathan Rees QC.

“Whilst he managed to dodge the first blow from Ezra Abeka-Soares, he was unable to avoid a lunge from Morgan Mockford who stabbed him, once, to the gut.

“The knife entered his belly and cut the aorta, the main artery in the body, causing massive and fatal blood loss. The whole attack was recorded on CCTV.

“Despite being fatally wounded, Elijah Dornelly ran off and made his way to the rear entrance of a shisha cafe called Arabian Nights.

“He ran inside and subsequently collapsed. His intestines were spilling out of his belly.”

Reported rapes are running three times higher in London than in NYC https://t.co/oc60cWbDAZ — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 21, 2017

London mayor Sadiq Khan, who represents the left-liberal Labour Party, claimed as recently as March this year that London is “the safest global city in the world and one of the safest cities in the world”.

However, police crime statistics show that the city does, in fact, appear to be in the grip of a crime wave, and is now more dangerous than New York City — once so notorious for lawlessness that it became a regular setting for thriller films such as Charles Bronson’s Death Wish.

A selection of statistics on crimes ranging from assault to firearms offences show the scale of the problem:

1,229,260 offences of violence against the person, an increase of 19 per cent on the previous year.

129,700 sexual offences, an increase of 19 per cent on the previous year.

45,100 rapes, an increase of 22 per cent on the previous year.

36,998 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, an increase of 26 per cent on the previous year.

6,696 offences involving firearms, an increase of 27 per cent on the previous year — despite draconian controls on legal gun-ownership.

London is also the epicentre for some of the most headline-grabbing crimes, including acid attacks and terrorism-related offences.

While the city’s police force has been subject to substantial budget cuts, its funding and manpower do remain roughly on par with New York’s, with critics pointing to the deliberate abandonment of beat policing and refusal to investigate low-level crime — the exact opposite of New York’s policing strategy — accounting for the cities’ differing fortunes.

Police have also been criticised for prioritising so-called “online hate crime” — with Khan’s enthusiastic support — over violent and acquisitive crime, with the Metropolitan Police detaining some 867 people under the Communications Act for supposedly offensive social media posts in 2016.

The number of prosecutions for such offences has actually dropped despite the huge increase in arrests, suggesting the ever-increasing attention paid to such offences by police is not being matched by a genuine increase in legitimately malicious communications.

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery