An officer worthy of the highest praise

The fatal stabbing of three people in a park in Reading and the severe injuries inflicted on several others have been declared a terrorist incident. The suspect, a Libyan asylum seeker named as Khairi Saadallah, allegedly went on the rampage on Saturday stabbing apparently at random. The toll of death and injury might have been much higher had it not been for the heroic action of a police officer in tackling the alleged assailant and arresting him.

Given the criticism the police have endured through having to enforce often arbitrary pandemic lockdown measures, this was a reminder of how they have to place themselves in potentially mortal danger to protect the public from harm. The officer involved and his colleagues who backed him up are worthy of the highest praise.

The investigation is at an early stage but it is reported that the suspect was already known to the authorities having been convicted of minor nonterrorist offences. Neil Basu, assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, said they did not think anyone else was involved, suggesting the suspect was a “lone actor” individual, who his friends say was a convert to Christianity. The police insist his actions had no link to the Black Lives Matter march which had finished a few hours earlier in the same park.

The lack of any support network or obvious link to jihadist groups make this an unusual alleged offence and may yet be attributed to a mental illness. It is also unusual for a terrorist to target a provincial town rather than London or a major city where they think the publicity will be greater.

In the past, perpetrators operated in cells, having been trained usually by al-qaeda, whose bases have been destroyed. Deadly attacks over the past few years have mostly involved knifings or the use of cars or vans, which are easy to obtain and do not alert the police in the way that bombers can do.

While complacency must be avoided, mass fatality bombings of the sort seen on the London Underground in 2005 and in Manchester five years ago are now mercifully rare when once they were the greatest immediate concerns of the police and MI5. Stopping low-level, albeit murderous, attacks requires intelligence about potential radicals and relies on people suspicious of an individual’s behaviour to come forward. It also requires human rights laws to help fight this menace and not block the deportation of convicted foreign nationals.