A young Englishman of Somali origin, sympathizer of the jihadist group Islamic State, was sentenced on Wednesday April 13 to life imprisonment without the possibility of release for the murder of British MP David Amess, who had shocked and moved in the United Kingdom last fall.

In sentencing Ali Harbi Ali, 26, Judge Nigel Sweeney of the Criminal Court of the Old Bailey in London stressed that he had "no remorse or shame, on the contrary" for the stabbing murder of the elected during a parliamentary permanence on October 15th.

"This is a murder that struck at the heart of our democracy," the judge said.

Full life is a very rare sentence, which was imposed last September on police officer Wayne Couzens, convicted of the March 2021 murder of Londoner Sarah Everard, as well as the murderer of MP Jo Cox, the extreme supporter right Thomas Mair.

Premeditated "act of revenge"

Prosecutor Tom Little had stressed that the murder of David Amess was an "act of revenge", premeditated "long time" and affecting an elected official in the exercise of his mission.

Ali Harbi Ali, who was born and raised in London in a family of Somali origin, was therefore found guilty on Monday of murder and preparation of terrorist acts.

The young man had pleaded not guilty, but declared last week at the hearing to have targeted the 69-year-old elected official because the latter had voted in favor of airstrikes in Syria.

Frustrated at not going to fight in Syria himself with the Islamic State group, the accused said to himself that he had to "try to do something here to help the Muslims there".

The attack occurred while David Amess, father of five, received his constituents in a Methodist church in Leigh-on-Sea, 60 kilometers east of London.

The elected conservative had been stabbed twenty times.

Debate on the security of elected officials

His assistant, Julie Cushion, said in a statement that she could "never forget the cry" of her colleague Barbara at the time of the attack.

She also described the attacker's "blissful and self-satisfied" look after the tragedy.

"It breaks our hearts to know that our husband and father had to greet the killer with a friendly smile," the MP's family said in a statement.

The death of David Amess, elected since 1983, had rekindled the trauma of the assassination of Labor elected Jo Cox in June 2016. This 41-year-old MP had been killed by several bullets and stab wounds a week before the British referendum on membership of the European Union.

These two tragedies have prompted calls to strengthen the security of elected officials and to calm an electric political debate in recent years, especially since the exchanges around Brexit.

Preparation for acts of terrorism

Ali Harbi Ali had, according to British media, briefly completed a counter-radicalization program, without being considered at risk by the security services.

In addition to his full life sentence for the murder of David Amess, he received a life sentence for preparing acts of terrorism.

He had considered killing other MPs and had prowled around Parliament armed with a knife last summer.

He had conducted research on several elected officials and had visited several times near the home of Minister Michael Gove.

Ali Harbi Ali was arrested a few minutes after the tragedy, by two policemen armed only with truncheons and tear gas canisters.

The UK has seen several jihadist knife attacks in recent years, some claimed by the Islamic State group.

But no claims have been made public since the death of David Amess.

A month after the murder of David Amess and the day after the explosion of a taxi in front of a hospital in Liverpool (northern England), considered by the police to be an attack, the government had raised to "serious" the level of terrorist threat on British soil.

It has since been downgraded to "important".

With AFP

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