Crossbow man jailed nine years for plot to kill queen

Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, will serve the first part of his term in high-security Broadmoor psychiatric hospital.

A van believed to be transporting Jaswant Singh Chail arriving at the Westminster Magistrates' Court, in London, on August 17. Picture: AFP

A man who admitted trying to kill the late Queen Elizabeth II after being found on the grounds of Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow, on Thursday was handed a nine-year sentence.

Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, will serve the first part of his term in high-security Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, moving to prison when his mental health permits.

The former supermarket worker had “lost touch with reality so that he had become psychotic”, said sentencing judge Nicholas Hilliard at London’s Old Bailey court.

After breaking into the grounds of the queen’s residence on Christmas Day 2021, Chail admitted to an armed officer at the scene he was there “to kill the queen”. In a journal, he wrote that if he could not get the monarch, he would “go for” the “prince” as a “suitable figurehead”, in an apparent reference to her son, now King Charles III.

Chail pleaded guilty to three charges at a previous hearing, becoming the first person to admit treason in the UK in decades.

In the last such case, Briton Marcus Sarjeant was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in 1981 after pleading guilty to firing blank shots at the queen when she was participating in a horseback parade in central London.

Chail, who appeared in court wearing black combat trousers and a black shirt, also admitted to making threats to kill and possessing an offensive weapon.

Judge Hilliard said on sentencing that Chail had also been “informed by the fantasy world of Star Wars” and mounted the planned attack dressed as a Sith Lord, wearing an iron mask and carrying a loaded crossbow.

Jaswant Singh Chail.

Chail also believed he was communicating with an angel via an AI chatbot and planned the attack as revenge for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre of Indians by British colonial troops, the judge added. The death toll remains disputed but hundreds were killed when troops opened fire on a crowd in Amritsar.

Prosecutor Alison Morgan previously said “in addition to that fixation with a real historic event, the defendant demonstrated a wider ideology focused on destroying old empires spilling over into fictional events such as Star Wars”.

After his arrest, it emerged he had stated his intent in a video recorded four days earlier, which he sent to his phone contacts list about 10 minutes before he was apprehended.

Queen Elizabeth passed away peacefully nearly nine months later, on September 8, aged 96, after a year of failing health.

AFP