'You cannot be soft on this': Boris Johnson calls for stop and search increase to combat London knife crime surge

Boris Johnson has called for an increased use of stop and search powers to combat knife crime following a spate of fatal stabbings in London.

The Foreign Secretary warned against “going soft” as he insisted that Scotland Yard and Sadiq Khan “come down like a ton of bricks” on gang leaders.

His comments came after teenager Sami Sidhom, 18, was knifed to death on Monday night in the capital’s third killing in two days.

Mr Johnson said when he was Mayor of London he adopted a dual approach that boosted stop and search incidents while mentoring young people to prevent them getting sucked into gang violence.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, he told current London mayor Sadiq Khan: “You cannot be soft on this."

He continued: "If people are going to go equipped with a knife, they are putting other people at risk and they are putting themselves at risk.

"You have got to stop them, you have got to search them and you have got to take the knives out of their possession.

"And we did that with Operation Blunt II. We took tens of thousands of knives off the streets."

He added: "It was controversial, people said it was unfair, but, by God, it worked.

"I got serious youth violence down by 32%. We cut the murder rate by 50%.

"We got the murder rate down to fewer than 100 a year for several years running, which is amazing for a city of 8.5 million."

It comes after Mr Sidhom was outside his home in Forest Gate when four men leapt from two cars to attack him and left him bleeding in the street on Monday.

He became the 12th teenager to be murdered in London so far this year, following a surge of killings across the city which has seen the Met launch 60 murder inquiries.