The officers have arrested an armed suspect who intruded the Windsor Castle grounds on Christmas morning with the intentions to murder Queen Elizabeth.
The suspect was identified as Jaswant Singh Chail, 20, from Southampton, England, who was charged under the Treason Act for breaching the Windsor Castle grounds armed with a high-powered crossbow.
Chail shared a video on a Snapchat in which he appeared in a mask and revealed his intentions to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II in a revenged against the hundreds of deaths from a colonial British military attack on trapped Indian civilians in April 1919.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I’ve done and what I will do, I will attempt to assassinate Elizabeth, Queen of the Royal Family. This is revenge for those who have died in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. It is also revenge for those who have been killed, humiliated and discriminated on because of their race.”
Chail, kept housed at the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital in Berkshire and appeared remotely at the Westminster magistrate’s court.
According to the court hearing,
Prosecutors said Chail was spotted on the grounds of Windsor Castle at around 8:10 a.m. on Christmas day last year. He was allegedly armed with a Supersonic X-bow, a weapon capable of causing “serious or fatal injuries,”
Queen Elizabeth II, 96, was celebrating Christmas at the royal residence with her son Charles, Prince of Wales, and daughter-in-law, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Her other son, Prince Edward, and daughter-in-law, Sophie Rhys-Jones — the Earl and Countess of Wessex — were due to meet with the Queen for lunch later in the day.
Charges under the 1842 Treason Act are rare. According to the Guardian, Chail is the first person to be jailed under the offense since 1981, when Marcus Sarjeant pleaded guilty to firing blanks at the Queen as she made an appearance at a London mall.
Chail has not yet been asked to enter a plea. He was remanded into custody and is scheduled to appear at the Old Bailey on Sept. 14.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre was committed in April 1919, after the British Brigadier General in India, Reginald Dyer, had declared martial law and prohibited public gatherings in the sacred Sikh city of Amritsar, which was due to host tens of thousands of Indians on April 13 for the Baisakhi spring harvest festival. When 10,000 or more celebrants had gathered on the Jallianwala Bagh, a large garden area enclosed on all four sides with several narrow, often-locked entrances, British troops blocked the main entrance and shot at the thousand of people they'd trapped there until their ammunition was exhausted. At least 379 people and more than 1,500 others were injured.
