In June 2020, three men were stabbed to death in Reading, a town 50 miles west of London. The attacker, Khairi Saadallah, admitted on Tuesday that he murdered the men. He is a Libyan national and is known to have taken part in Libya’s 2011 revolution but was granted refugee status in the UK in 2018.
Khairi Saadallah, 26, stabbed to death three innocent men; US citizen Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, history teacher James Furlong, 36, and scientist David Wails, 49, as they sunbathed in Forbury Gardens in the centre of Reading one day in June 2020.
The court hearing started on 5 January at the Old Bailey in London. He is yet to be given a sentence, which is set to be pronounced at the end of the hearing on 11 January, according to Mr Justice Sweeney.
The prosecutor, Alison Morgan, told the court that Saadallah was motivated by a belief in “religious jihad” and had intended to “kill as many people as he could” in the name of that “Islamist cause.”
Saadallah has admitted three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder but denies that the killings were motivated by any religious or ideological cause.
The court heard Saadallah arrived in Britain in 2012 and was originally refused asylum after it surfaced that he had been involved in militias fighting against the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, during the Arab Spring.
However, he appealed against deportation and managed to stay in Britain. The court heard he was convicted of various offences between 2013 and the killings in June 2020.