Nine years in prison for a UK man who attempted to kill Queen Elizabeth II

A man who acknowledged trying to murder the late Queen Elizabeth II after being discovered on the Windsor Castle grounds carrying a loaded crossbow was given a nine-year sentence on Thursday.

The 21-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail will begin serving his sentence at the high-security Broadmoor psychiatric institution and transfer to prison as his mental condition permits.

In order to become psychotic, the former supermarket employee “lost touch with reality,” according to sentencing judge Nicholas Hilliard at London’s Old Bailey court.

On Christmas Day 2021, Chail acknowledged to an armed officer on the scene that he had broken into the grounds of the queen’s home “to kill the queen.”

He apparently made allusion to her son, the current King Charles III, when he wrote in a journal that if he couldn’t have the king, he would “go for” the “prince” as a “suitable figurehead”.

Chail was the first individual to confess to treason in the UK in many years when he entered a guilty plea to three charges at an earlier hearing.

In the most recent instance, Briton Marcus Sarjeant admitted guilt to shooting blank bullets at the queen when she was taking part in a horse-drawn parade in downtown London and was given a five-year prison sentence in 1981.

Chail, who showed up in court on Thursday wearing black combat pants and a black shirt, also acknowledged threatening to kill people and having a dangerous weapon.

Relationship with Chatbots
At the time of sentencing, Judge Hilliard stated that Chail had also been “informed by the fantasy world of Star Wars” and had carried out the planned attack while wearing a Sith Lord’s iron mask, a crossbow, and other accessories.

The judge said that Chail also thought he was in contact with an angel through an AI chatbot and that he planned the assault in retaliation for the 1919 British colonial troops’ slaughter of Indians at Jallianwala Bagh.

In a prior statement, prosecutor Alison Morgan noted that the defendant “demonstrated a wider ideology focused on destroying old empires spilling over into fictional events like Star Wars, in addition to that fixation with a real historic event.”

It was discovered after his arrest that he had declared his intentions in a video shot four days prior and transmitted to his phone contacts list about 10 minutes prior to his capture.

After a year of deteriorating health, Queen Elizabeth passed away peacefully on September 8 at the age of 96. This was nearly nine months later.

The queen was spending Christmas Day at Windsor Castle with Charles and his wife Camilla when Chail’s incursion took place.

The would-be assailant scaled the perimeter of the grounds using a nylon rope ladder while wearing all-black clothing, a hood, gloves, and a metal mask.

Before being taken into custody without a struggle, he was in the premises for around two hours.

According to the prosecutors, the crossbow he was in possession of was loaded and ready to shoot, with its safety catch in the “off” position.

The court previously heard that Chail had previously applied to join the Ministry of Defence Police and the Grenadier Guards in an effort to mingle with the royal family.

Before entering the castle grounds, Chail stated he was “sorry for what I’ve done and what I will do” in a video he posted with his acquaintances on Snapchat.

He said, referring to the 1919 carnage in India, “I will try to assassinate Elizabeth, Queen of the Royal Family.”

Although the exact number of victims in that atrocity is still debatable, hundreds were slain when British forces in Amritsar opened fire on a crowded throng.