The death of MP David Amess, stabbed in full parliamentary office in October, had upset the United Kingdom: the 26-year-old accused, arrested on the spot, was found guilty on Monday of murder and preparation of terrorist acts.
• Read also: Murder of a British MP: his family calls to “put aside hatred”
• Read also: Great Britain: an MP stabbed to death
It took just 18 minutes for jurors in London’s Old Bailey court to deliberate and convict Ali Harbi Ali, who was born and raised in London to a family of Somali descent. His sentence will be handed down on Wednesday.
Judged since March 21, he refused to stand up to hear the verdict pronounced by Judge Nigel Sweeney, citing religious reasons.
The young man had pleaded not guilty, but he had declared last week at the hearing to have targeted the 69-year-old elected official because the latter had voted in favor of airstrikes in Syria.
“I killed him because he was hurting Muslims,” he said.
“I felt that if I could kill someone who decided to kill Muslims, it could prevent more harm from being done to those Muslims,” he continued. “Perhaps it sends a message to his colleagues” too.
Frustrated at not going to fight in Syria himself with the Islamic State group, the accused said to himself that he had to “try to do something here to help the Muslims there”.
The attack occurred on October 15 when David Amess, father of five, received his constituents in a Methodist church in Leigh-on-Sea, 60 kilometers east of London.
Safety of elected officials
The death of the deputy, elected since 1983, had rekindled the trauma of the assassination of the elected Labor representative Jo Cox in June 2016.
The 41-year-old MP was shot and stabbed several times by right-wing extremist Thomas Mair, 53, a week before Britain’s referendum on EU membership.
These two tragedies have prompted calls to strengthen the security of elected officials and to calm an electric political debate in recent years, especially since the exchanges around Brexit.
Ali Harbi Ali had, according to British media, briefly completed a counter-radicalization program, without being considered at risk by the security services.
Tried for preparing acts of terrorism between May 1, 2019 and September 28, 2021, he had been described by the prosecutor as a “fanatic, radicalized Islamist terrorist”.
He had considered killing other MPs, and had prowled around Parliament armed with a knife last summer, researched several MPs and visited several times near the home of Minister Michael Gove.
Affirming during the trial to be “a moderate Muslim”, the Londoner assured that he had no regrets: “If I thought I was doing something wrong, I would not have done it”.
The UK has seen several jihadist knife attacks in recent years, some claimed by the Islamic State group. No claims have been made public since the death of David Amess.
A month after the murder of David Amess and the day after the explosion of a taxi in front of a hospital in Liverpool (northern England), considered by the police to be an attack, the government had raised to “serious” the level of terrorist threat on British soil. It has since been downgraded to ‘important’.