Nothing is yet known of any possible motives of the man arrested in connection with the Reading triple killing. The suspect, 25-year-old Khairi Saadallah, appears in various reports to be a gregarious figure, a Christian convert and regarded by friends as “essentially British”.
It seems this man had no link to any terror activity or network. He was never on the list of MI5’s 3,000 “subjects of interest”. He shouted no Islamist slogans when allegedly committing the offences. His only significant trait, according to friends and family members interviewed, is that he had mental health problems and suffered “psychotic episodes”. According to one report he had a “very bad mental disturbance”, which was exacerbated after going to prison in 2017 for a minor offence.
In other words this crime could be the act of an unstable mind. As with the killing of the Palace of Westminster policeman in 2017, such acts are not the outcome of any conspiracy or evident premeditation, and are therefore near impossible to predict or prevent. When it comes to national security, they can only sensibly be treated as violent accidents.
The police in Reading changed their classification of the incident from a killing to a terrorist offence sometime after the arrest. It would appear this was on learning that the suspect came to Britain from Libya in 2012 and “was on the MI5 radar”. But this meant only that he was one of 30,000 names, subject to a report of having “travel aspirations”.
The stark reality is 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. It is the one area of crime that has not diminished in recent years, largely thanks to the unregulated chaos of the nation’s narcotics industry. If we are to use the word, then the greatest “terror” in modern Britain is that generated by drug gangs – but compared with the resources devoted to Islamist extremism, the efforts put towards tacking it are paltry. Look no further for Britain’s true “terrorism” scandal.
This means that we need to be careful how we react to events that are closer to randomly tragic accidents. There is no purpose in defining as political – let alone dramatising and, in the minds of some, glamourising – what may have been the fatal perversions of a diseased mind. Britain is currently passing through a moment of extraordinary mass fear. It has been created by government to promote its lockdown policy towards coronavirus, among other things. It has bred a damaging hostility to outsiders and an aversion to returning to normality. The cost of this fear is enormous, and wholly disregarded by its propagators.
At present we haven’t sifted through all the evidence in Saturday’s attack, but at the moment 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
June 23, 2020 at 04:58PM
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We are quick to label the Reading attack terrorism – but there is little benefit in doing so - The Guardian
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