Twenty-one-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail was formally indicted last August on charges of violating the Treason Act.
The young man had tried to infiltrate armed with a crossbow on Christmas Day 2021 in Windsor Castle: Queen Elizabeth II’s habitual residence during the Covid emergency, who in the meantime died in September 2022.
Chail, a British citizen of Asian descent residing in the Southampton area, appeared today before a judge at London’s Old Bailey court for a hearing in his case. And at the formal question he pleaded guilty to each of the counts: high treason, illegal possession of an offensive weapon, as well as a death threat (for having openly declared to a police officer, who promptly intervened to stop and handcuff him, that he was arrived with the intention of “killing the queen”).
Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, is the first person to be convicted of treason in Great Britain since 1981. He was identified and stopped by a royal guard who was in front of a gate leading to the Queen’s private apartments. Dressed in black, with a hood on his head and a balaclava, Chail was holding a crossbow that had been loaded with a bolt and the safety was not engaged when he was stopped.
With him, the man, who was unemployed but had previously worked in a supermarket, had a note with the inscription: “Please don’t take my clothes, shoes and gloves, masks etc., I don’t want an autopsy, I don’t want the embalming, thank you and I’m sorry”.
In a video posted on Snapchat minutes before entering the castle, Chail said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry for what I’ve done and what I’m going to do. I will attempt to assassinate Elizabeth, queen of the royal family. This is revenge for those who died in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. It is also revenge for those who were killed, humiliated and discriminated against because of their race.”
The reference is to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that took place after British troops opened fire on thousands of people who had gathered in the city of Amritsar in India.
