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The man who murdered three people in one minute in a Reading park was fueled by terrorism and has been sentenced to spend his entire life in jail.
Khairi Saadallah, 26, carried out the attacks on June 20 last year during which he shouted “Allahu Akbar”.
Victims were enjoying a summer night during the first coronavirus lockdown at Forbury Gardens, Reading.
Saadallah was sentenced at the Old Bailey on Monday, having pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to all three murders and three attempted murders.
The victims, all fatally stabbed within 60 seconds, were James Furlong, 36, a history professor; David Wails, 49, scientist; and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, American pharmaceutical worker.
Ritchie-Bennett and Furlong suffered unique neck injuries. Wails was stabbed once in the back, with the crown arguing that the accuracy of the wounds showed that 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 long-standing interest in extremism and, in 2019, had accessed material on his mobile phone about Mohammed Emwazi, the Isis propagandist seen in videos taunting the victims before killing them, and two days earlier. After the attack, he had accessed a website with the flag. associated with Isis, who had organized numerous attacks against Western targets. In 2017, it was alleged that he associated with an extremist Islamist preacher while serving a prison sentence.
Saadallah was from Libya and came to Britain fleeing the confusion there. His defense offered against the prosecution’s case that he was a terrorist who should be jailed until his death 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 tattooed on his leg, had prayed in a church and had told police in an interview that he was “part Muslim and part Catholic.”
He had serious mental health problems and before the wave of stabbings last June he was evaluated twice by the security services, but it was considered that he did not represent a danger of organizing an attack.
In 2018, it is understood that he was evaluated by Prevent and found to have no clear ideology. It was felt that she needed additional mental health support.
In 2019, MI5 investigated Saadallah for being a person who could travel to Libya “for extremist reasons”. This claim was found to be lacking in credibility and was found to be far from the legal threshold for investigation.
