Reading terror attack ‘probably avoidable’ if not for police and NHS failures

The Reading terror attack could have been stopped if the police and NHS had intervened, a coroner concluded.

Khairi Saadallah murdered James Furlong, 36, Dr David Wails, 49, and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, in Forbury Gardens in on June 20, 2020.

The Libyan refugee injured three others – Stephen Young, Patrick Edwards and Nishit Nisudan – in the mass stabbing before fleeing with with an off-duty police officer on his tail.

But Thames Valley Police had failed to find a knife in his home during a welfare check the previous day, an inquest at the Old Bailey heard.

Officers had not been told he was threatening to harm himself and others.

But the judge coroner said he accepts that based on the information available to the officers before the visit, they had “no reasonable ground to arrest KS or consider detaining him”.

Judge Coroner Sir Adrian Fulford accepted that officers had ‘no reasonable ground to arrest KS or consider detaining him’ based on information available to them before the visit.

But the judge coroner did highlight ‘the failings of multiple agencies’ as contributing to the three deaths that day.

Saadallah was given a whole-life sentence after pleading guilty to three murders and three attempted murders at the Old Bailey in January 2021.

He initially arrived lawfully in the UK in April 2012 on a visitor’s visa that expired that September.

For years he was stuck ‘in limbo’, his asylum application refused but unable to be deported due to the civil war in Libya.

A series of convictions for various offences – including theft and assault – indicated a ‘deterioration in his behaviour from late 2018’, Judge Coroner Fulford said.

He was carrying offensive weapons in public and had ‘demonstrated a propensity to attack others’.

But opportunities to intervene were missed.

If his ‘extremist risk had been better analysed’, the attacks would never have happened because it would have seen him recalled to custody the day before, the judge coroner said.

A counsellor told the inquest he had ‘harassed’ mental health services to examine the attacker in the year before the killings.

Saadallah had borderline personality disorder, and may have also had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), leading to alcohol or drug abuse.

But this left him in a ‘catch 22 dilemma’ because it meant he was permanently ineligible for treatment.

This was one of a number of failures by Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust Community Mental Health Team named by the judge corner.

The deaths ‘probably would have been avoidable’ if the mental health service had given ‘greater priority to stabilising [him] and securing access to long-term psychological therapy’.

Nick Harborne, from Reading Refugee Support Group, raised concerns about Saadallah when he wrote to NHS Berkshire West Clinical Commissioning Group on December 4 2019 seeking funding for mental health support for his group.

He said Saadallah was ‘now extremely vulnerable to being radicalised’.

Harborne added: ‘I am fearful if he does not now get the right support for his trauma whilst in prison, there could disastrous consequences on his release.’

Four times, Saadallah was referred to Prevent, but each referral was closed as he was no longer in the community having been sent to prison, the court heard.

It was also ‘because of a widely accepted assessment that any risk he posed was based on his mental health difficulties, as opposed to an adherence to an extremist ideology’.

This failure to identify and act on the risk Saadallah posed was a ‘matter that has caused me some real concern’, according to the judge coroner who said he’s been told ‘significant lessons have been learned’.

Before his release from HMP Bullingdon, Saadallah said he would ‘stab someone’ during an ‘outburst’.

But this did not form part of an intelligence report until after the attack, the judge coroner said.

MI5 declared him a ‘subject of interest’ for some months in 2019.

But the intelligence agency has ‘no credible intelligence to suggest [he] was planning an attack on the UK’, according to the judge coroner.

Despite saying there was ‘no realistic possibility of MI5 preventing the attack on Forbury Gardens’, he described information provided to MI5 by Counter Terrorism Policing South East as ‘inadequate’.

Saadalah’s mental state formed a large part of the proceedings where probation, immigration, police and MI5 workers gave evidence over several weeks this year.

One probation worker cried as she recalled unknowingly ‘managing a convicted murder’.

Judge Coroner Fulford recorded a conclusion of unlawful killing for the deaths.

He will also issue a Prevention of Future Deaths report to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Secretary of State for Justice, chief constable of Thames Valley Police, Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Midlands Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust.

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