The recent 18 year sentence handed out to Mohamad Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed-Alim highlights a number of interesting and challenging issues. For those unfamiliar with the case, Saeed-Alim walked into an Exeter restaurant in May last year with the intention of causing major loss of life to customers and staff at a 'family friendly' restaurant during a busy Thursday lunchtime. It appears that Saeed-Alim also planned to end his own life as a suicide note was later found at the home he shared with his mother and 10-year old brother.

Saeed-Alim’s choice of target for his own death and the deaths of many others was a Giraffe Restaurant. The chain describes itself as ‘World Music Family Restaurants’, with 28 branches (five at UK airports) across the UK. The restaurant proudly proclaims ‘love, eat, live’ – this was so nearly the opposite of what might have happened.

What makes a 22-year old man with Asperger’s syndrome and learning difficulties want to undertake such a terrible crime. For me a number of very concerning issues emerge when we look at this case closely – issues that make me reconsider some of my assumptions. Saeed-Alim, as he now wishes to be known, was born Nicky Reilly and converted to Islam when he was 16.

According to BBC news on its website, the court was told his mother had first taken her son to see a psychiatrist at the age of nine, reporting obsessive behaviour and temper tantrums. It emerged that he felt rejected by his father and that later on he began to self-harm. When he was 16 he took an overdose.
A picture emerges of a young man with emotional and behavioural problems that might in part be organic and in part have their roots in his experiences whilst growing up.

In our work at Respond we are confronted daily by the realities of broken attachments and bottled up pain that sometimes explodes catastrophically inwards – in self-harming – or outwards in violence towards others.

My original assumptions on hearing about this incident included thinking that Saeed-Alim had been radicalised by radical Islamists who had somehow brainwashed this vulnerable young man into carrying out an atrocity in the name of Jihad. I also had in my mind that in February 2008 it was alleged that two women with Down’s Syndrome were sent into two busy pet markets in Baghdad where the bombs that were strapped to them were detonated by remote control.

There was outrage at the time about the carnage they created when at least 90 people died. The ‘fact’ that they had Down’s Syndrome made the crime even more wicked and one imagined the heartless and cruel individuals who put them up to this.

It since transpired that the women did not have Down’s Syndrome (they may have had psychiatric histories of depression or schizophrenia) and there is a suspicion that the story was hyped as a way to discredit al-Qaeda even further by claiming it had stooped to a new low. Going further back to polling day in Iraq in February 2005, a 19-year old man with Down’s Syndrome detonated a device that was strapped to him, whilst walking in open ground. The device might have gone off prematurely or he might have chosen to detonate it away from anyone else.

These tales again make me think how quick we are to sometimes jump to conclusions about people’s motivations and abilities. We presume that people with learning disabilities are easily lead and vulnerable to the will of people who are out to exploit them. I think we are often right but as with Saeed-Alim I propose that at some level his wish to kill was an expression of a deep feeling of hatred that he has experienced from others in society. I am of course not suggesting that all people with learning difficulties are hated, but that there is in society an often disowned and unspoken hostility towards people who appear to be different.

There are psychological reasons for this that I will not go into here, but I believe that these feelings can be internalised and create extreme reactions. What is interesting in the case of Saeed-Alim is the extreme reaction that was triggered in him when he became interested or ‘obsessed’ with the cause of radical Islam and al-Qaeda. I believe that for him the cause touched a nerve by which he was able to direct his feelings of resentment and revenge at a society that marginalised and objectified him.

The death of diners at a ‘family friendly’ restaurant may have seemed to make perverse sense to Saeed-Alim. His father’s rejection of him and living with his non-disabled brother might have affected him in such an extreme way that suicide and revenge against ‘the family’ seemed to help him to release his aggression and pain.