The man who murdered three people within a minute in a Reading park was driven by terrorism and has been sentenced to spend his whole life in jail.
Khairi Saadallah, 26, carried out the attacks on 20 June last year during which he shouted “Allahu Akbar”.
The victims were enjoying a summer evening during the first coronavirus lockdown in Forbury Gardens, Reading.
Saadallah was sentenced at the Old Bailey on Monday, having pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to the three murders and three attempted murders.
The victims, all fatally stabbed within 60 seconds, were James Furlong, 36, a history teacher; David Wails, 49, a scientist; and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, an American pharmaceutical worker.
Ritchie-Bennett and Furlong suffered single wounds to their necks. Wails was stabbed once in the back, with the crown arguing the precision of the wounds showing the attacker knew how to inflict maximum damage with the knife he had bought from a supermarket the day before.
Saadallah also stabbed Stephen Young, Patrick Edwards and Nishit Nisudan, who were sitting nearby and were lucky to survive.
The prosecutions said Saadallah had a longstanding interest in extremism and in 2019, had accessed material on his mobile phone about Mohammed Emwazi, the Isis propagandist seen in videos taunting victims before killing them, and two days before the attack had accessed a website with the flag associated with Isis, which had staged numerous attacks against western targets. He was alleged in 2017 to have associated with an extremist Islamist preacher while serving a prison sentence.
Saadallah was from Libya and came to Britain fleeing the turmoil there. His defence offered against the prosecutions case that he was a terrorist who should be imprisoned until he dies was that he only had a “fleeting or occasional interest” in Islamist extremism, and that was only part of what drove him.
The attacker had a crucifix tattoo on his leg, had prayed in a church, and had told police in an interview he was “part Muslim and part Catholic”.
He had severe mental health problems and prior to the stabbing spree last June was twice assessed by security services but was deemed to pose no danger of staging an attack.
In 2018, he is understood to have been assessed by Prevent and found to have no clear ideology. He was deemed to need additional mental health support.
In 2019 MI5 had Saadallah under investigation as a person who might travel to Libya “for extremist reasons”. That claim was found to lack credibility and he was assessed as being far from the legal threshold for investigation.
source https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/11/reading-attacker-khairi-saadallah-given-whole-life-prison-sentence
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