This archive report was first published on 22 June 2020.
On June 22, 2020, the world was shocked by the Reading triple killing. The suspect, 25-year-old Khairi Saadallah, has been arrested, but the motives behind the attack are still unknown. According to various reports, Saadallah was a gregarious figure, a Christian convert, and was regarded by friends as “essentially British”.
Despite initial reports suggesting a possible link to terror activity, it appears that Saadallah had no connection to any terror network. He was not on the list of MI5’s 3,000 “subjects of interest” and shouted no Islamist slogans during the alleged offense. His only significant trait, according to friends and family members, was that he had mental health problems and suffered “psychotic episodes”.
One report suggested that Saadallah had a “very bad mental disturbance” which was exacerbated after going to prison in 2017 for a minor offense. This raises questions about whether the attack was the result of an unstable mind or a premeditated act.
As with the killing of the Palace of Westminster policeman in 2017, such acts are often difficult to predict or prevent. They can only be treated as violent accidents, rather than the outcome of a conspiracy or premeditation.
The police in Reading initially classified the incident as a killing, but later changed it to a terrorist offense after learning that Saadallah came to Britain from Libya in 2012 and was on the MI5 radar. However, this meant only that he was one of 30,000 names, subject to a report of having “travel aspirations”.
It is worth noting that people are stabbed in Britain’s cities every week without making the headlines. Often, victims are suffering as a result of gangland bravado or revenge. The unregulated chaos of the nation’s narcotics industry is largely responsible for this trend.
As we react to events like the Reading attack, we need to be careful not to define them as political or dramatize them. This can create a damaging hostility to outsiders and an aversion to returning to normality. The cost of this fear is enormous, and it is being disregarded by its propagators.
At present, we haven’t sifted through all the evidence in the attack, but it is clear that only one individual with a history of mental health problems has been arrested. Perhaps it may prove otherwise, but there is no virtue at this stage in using the heightened narratives of extremist terrorism.
— Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
