Student who ‘wanted to know what killing felt like’ guilty of murdering woman on beach
A criminology student who butchered a physical trainer on Bournemouth beach ‘to know what it would feel like’ to kill someone is facing a life sentence after being convicted of murder.
Nasen Saadi, 20, who called himself ‘Ninja Killer’, stabbed Amie Gray, 34, and her friend Leanne Miles, 39, after ambushing the pair as they chatted by a fire to keep warm on Durley Chine Beach late on May 24.
Amie died after suffering 10 knife wounds, some of which were inflicted as she tried to shield Leanne, who luckily survived despite being stabbed 20 times.
Jurors at Winchester Crown Court were played an audio recording of the attack, which included extended screams from the victims. They also heard Ms Miles’s harrowing 999 call as she begs the operator: ‘I am bleeding everywhere, I have been stabbed loads of times.’
Sarah Jones KC, prosecuting, told jurors of the attack: ‘Nasen Saadi, as he walked along that promenade and thought about the culmination of a plan he had worked on for who knows how long but which he had spent the last couple of nights walking through and researching.
‘Nothing fine or glorious in his plans I’m afraid, nothing of self-improvement or to benefit anyone else.
‘This defendant seems to have wanted to know what it would be like to take life, perhaps he wanted to know what it would be like to make women feel afraid, perhaps he thought it would make him feel powerful, make him interesting to others.
‘Perhaps he just couldn’t bear to see people engaged in a happy normal social interaction and he decided to lash out, to hurt, to butcher.’
Saadi, from Croydon in south London, was studying for a degree in criminology at Greenwich University.
The court heard he left lecturers baffled by veering off topic and randomly quizzing them about defences for killing someone, DNA analysis and other forensic evidence.
One even asked him after an exchange: ‘You’re not planning a murder, are you?’
Despite his research, the court heard he left police a trail that led them to him four days after the beach attack.
They found he had Googled ‘why is it harder for a killer to be caught if he does it in another town’ and ‘which is the deadliest knife’.
Before making the 100-mile journey to Bournemouth where he hoped he would get away with murder, he looked up the beach, how many people visited and what hotels had CCTV.
Cameras followed him from Clapham Junction station all the way to his Travelodge in Bournemouth, and then to the nearby Silver How Guest house.
They also tracked his movements as he conducted recces of the seafront on each evening of his stay before the fatal attack, as well as capturing the stabbings themselves.
Ms Jones told jurors: ‘With purpose, slowly, stealthily and quietly, when he thought no-one would observe him, he hovered at the edges of the promenade, then stepped on to the sand, and walked directly towards the two women with a knife in his hand.
‘In an act horrifying in its savagery and in its randomness he stabbed them both multiple times, chasing after them as they tried to escape or divert him from the other and he continued his attack.
‘He left them on the sand to bleed to death whilst he moved away and tried to disappear back into the shadows, away from the glare of the streetlights or the moonlight and back into anonymity.
‘He got rid of his weapon. He changed his clothes and shoes and got rid of them.’
Saadi was arrested four days later.
Analysis of the footage led to Saadi’s positive identification by a photographer who had been in the area at the time.
He told police that he could not remember that period of time and said he might have ‘blacked out’, that his arrest had been a case of ‘mistaken identity’ and he had ‘no reason to attack someone for no reason’.
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