by Anorak | 23rd, June 2020
How did James Furlong, David Wails and Joe Ritchie-Bennett die? The three men were at a pub in Reading when someone stabbed them to death. Khairi Saadallah, 25, has been arrested on suspicion of murder.
In the BBC’s profile of the suspect we learn that Saadallah was arrested under the Terrorism Act. Can we guess why he might have attacked three white, middle-aged gay men? If we see everything through the prism of race, as those on the far-Left and far-right insist that we should, isn’t the men’s identify relevant? Does the identity of victims and alleged perpetrator play a role in the way political leaders and media respond to attacks?
We’re told that Saadallah arrived in the UK from Libya in 2012. The police noticed him. MI5 had him marked as a person who might travel abroad for terrorism purposes.
Why? What is driving such thoughts and suspicions? The BBC cites someone who knows Saadallah. They say the suspect suffered from “post-traumatic stress from the civil war”. We read that his “long-standing mental health problems had been exacerbated by the coronavirus lockdown.” Last year he threw a TV from his top-floor flat window. He had a “mental health key worker”.
If this is a care in the community or health issue, why has the suspect been arrested as a suspected terrorist? If he is a terrorist, can we guess at his ideology? The BBC notes that police are “keeping an open mind as to the motive for this attack”.
The head of counter terrorism policing, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, says the attack was “unrelated to a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest held hours earlier in the park”.
So what is it related to? In the language of identify politics, was it a homophobic attack? Was it a racist attack? Was it a revenge attack?
BBC’s home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford reports that Saadallah seemed to be a “normal, genuine guy” who smoked cannabis. Did normality or marijuana drive him to it?
In his analysis of the horror the BBC’s home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani says: “Saturday’s horrifying killings may be another example of what security chiefs call a “lone actor” attack where a single individual turns extremist beliefs into murderous actions.”
What beliefs? We’re not told.