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This is odd

A man who has admitted treason after being caught in the grounds of Windsor Castle carrying a crossbow had previously applied to join the Grenadier Guards in a bid to get close to the Royal family.

Jaswant Singh Chail, who was armed and wearing a mask and a hood, was apprehended by royal protection officers close to the Queen’s private apartment just after 8am on Christmas Day 2021.

When challenged by a police officer and asked what he was doing, the 21-year-old replied: “I am here to kill the Queen”.

In a video recorded four days before the incident, Chail – who is of Sikh origin – claimed his actions were in revenge for the 1919 Amritsar massacre in which the British killed almost 400 Indian men women and children.

OK, nutters etc.

But being charged with and admitting treason? How many prosecutions for treason are there?

Sadly, now that even that crime no longer carries the death penalty, we can’t just look at the House of Commons and decide “not enough”. But how often does treason get trotted out as a charge?

11 thoughts on “This is odd”

  1. Interesting isn’t it. He was indeed ‘waging war on the sovereign’. The motive was her as Head of State rather than her as a person, since Amritsar was before her time. So maybe attempted murder of the Queen isn’t a crime, since she’s effectively outside the legal system. Regina v X in the case of Regina? Although I s’pose it’d be Reggie now.

  2. I thought that the Sikhs had had their revenge in 1940 when Michael ODwyer, who had benn governor of Punjab at the time was assassinated.
    Brig Gen Dyer snuffed it in 1927 of a stroke as I recall.

  3. @Ottokring
    Royal Navy Articles of War, you can find the text online. The punishment for each article is a very emphatic “shall suffer death”.

  4. @RichardT… And “Lord Haw-Haw” was more “murdered by the state” than “executed” – he was American-born and a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. He had the misfortune to have briefly held a UK passport, which was considered sufficient to find him guilty of Treason in those somewhat “overexcited” immediate-post-war times.

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