SUNDAY WORLD
A self-styled “assassin” who was encouraged by an AI chatbot to break into Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow to kill the late British queen has been locked up for nine years.
Star Wars fan Jaswant Singh Chail (21) had described himself as a “Sith” and “Darth Chailus” in a sinister video and confided his murderous plan to an artificial intelligence-generated “girlfriend” called Sarai, a court heard.
In a journal, he wrote that if the late queen had been “unobtainable” he would “go for” the “prince” as a “suitable figurehead”, in an apparent reference to Britain’s King Charles, then the Prince of Wales.
Chail was detained on Christmas Day 2021 close to the late queen’s private Berkshire residence, where she and other members of the royal family were staying at the time.
The former supermarket worker had scaled the perimeter of the castle with a nylon rope ladder and was in the grounds for two hours before two officers confronted him with tasers.
He was armed with a powerful crossbow with the safety catch off which was capable of firing bolts with “lethal” effect, the Old Bailey was told.
Chail pleaded guilty to an offence under the Treason Act, making a threat to kill the then-queen and having a loaded crossbow in a public place.
In a televised hearing at the Old Bailey on Friday, Mr Justice Hilliard sentenced him to nine years with a further five years on extended licence .
Under a “hybrid order”, Chail will be transferred from Broadmoor high security hospital to serve his sentence in prison when he is well enough.
The judge said: “The defendant harboured homicidal thoughts which he acted on before he became psychotic.
“His intention was not just to harm or alarm the sovereign – but to kill her.”
Previously, prosecutor Alison Morgan KC said the “heart of the issue” was whether Chail was suffering from auditory hallucinations at the time “taking away his ability to exercise self control”.
The defendant, from Southampton, Hampshire, was born in the UK of Indian Sikh heritage and has a twin sister.
Ms Morgan said Chail, then aged 19, had become angered by the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre at Amritsar in which hundreds of people were killed, after a visit in 2018.
She said: “In addition to that fixation with a real historic event, the defendant demonstrated a wider ideology focused on destroying old empires spilling over into fictional events such as Star Wars.
“The defendant’s key motive was to create a new empire by destroying the remnants of the British Empire in the UK, and the focal point of that became removal of the figurehead of the royal family.
