A man who murdered three men in 10 seconds on a summer evening in a Reading park, has been sentenced to die in prison after a judge determined it was a jihadist attack. Khairi Saadallah, 26, showed no emotion as the rare whole-life tariff was handed down by Mr Justice Sweeney for the “swift, ruthless and brutal” stabbings last June. Saadallah killed his victims with a single stab wound which investigators believed showed training and which police said resembled an “execution”. He had been part of a militia in Libya deemed to be Islamist extremists, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the stabbings. But during previous prison sentences for assault and other crimes, officials had classed him as vulnerable because of his extensive mental health problems, made worse by substance abuse. The attack happened on 20 June as the first coronavirus lockdown neared its end, with Saadallah approaching the park with a union jack bandana around his knee. The victims were James Furlong, 36, a history teacher; David Wails, 49, a scientist; and Joseph Ritchie-Bennett, 39, an American pharmaceutical worker. Ritchie-Bennett and Furlong suffered single wounds to their necks. Wails was stabbed once in the back, with the crown arguing the precision of the wounds showing the attacker knew how to inflict maximum damage with the knife he had bought from a supermarket the day before. Saadallah also stabbed Stephen Young, Patrick Edwards and Nishit Nisudan, who were sitting nearby and were lucky to survive. All six attacks took under 60 seconds, with Saadallah then fleeing. One Muslim member of the public who chased after Saadallah told him after he had been caught: “You have nothing to do with Islam, bastard.” Saadallah came to the UK in 2012 and tried and failed to get asylum seeker status, but the turmoil in Libya prevented his deportation. Sentencing Saadallah at the Old Bailey on Monday, Mr Justice Sweeney said: “Using his combat experience in each of their cases the defendant targeted a vulnerable area where a single thrust of the knife would, as he intended, inevitably cause death.” Saadallah had carried out reconnaissance on Forbury Gardens where the killings occurred. Sweeney added: “During the course of the attack and afterwards, and because he was seeking to advance a political, religious or ideological cause, the defendant was shouting in Arabic, ‘God is the greatest’ and ‘God accept my jihad’.” DCS Kath Barnes, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing South East, said: “The men he killed were not just murdered, they were executed at such a speed, they had very little chance to react or defend themselves. “The horrors of this incident took just a single minute to unfold. It took him less than 10 seconds to kill three innocent men, and he then went on to attack and tried to kill another three men before running off towards the town centre.” The court heard he was in prison at the same time as the extremist preacher Omar Brooks. Sources said Saadallah spent five days in the same part of the prison in 2017 with the ability to associate with Brooks, but was moved away as he was assessed as vulnerable due to poor mental health and potentially susceptible to radicalisation. The prosecution said Saadallah had a longstanding interest in extremism and in 2019, had accessed material on his mobile phone about Mohammed Emwazi, the Islamic State propagandist seen in videos taunting victims before killing them, and two days before the attack had accessed a website with the flag associated with Isis, which had staged numerous attacks against western targets. Material recovered from his mobile phone showed Saadallah holding firearms and in military fatigues. One photo shows a small handgun next to bullets arranged into a letter “K” for “Khairi”. He is believed to have been part of the Ansar Al-Sharia militia, now proscribed in the UK as being an Islamist extremist group, but once part of the western-backed effort to topple Muammar Gaddafi. The attacker had a crucifix tattoo on his leg, had prayed in a church, and had told police in an interview he was “part Muslim and part Catholic”. He had severe mental health problems and before the stabbings last June was twice assessed by security services but deemed to pose no danger of an attack. In 2018, he is understood to have been assessed by Prevent and found to have no clear ideology. He was deemed to need additional mental health support. In 2019 MI5 had Saadallah under investigation as a person who might travel to Libya “for extremist reasons”. That claim was found to lack credibility and he was assessed as being far from the legal threshold for investigation. He had previous convictions for theft and assault and was released on 5 June 2020 from prison, 15 days before the killings. Saadallah is one of 63 people in England and Wales serving whole-life tariffs, meaning they can never be released. Sweeney himself previously sentenced Michael Adebolajo, 29, who murdered Lee Rigby in 2013 to a whole-life tariff. An inquest into the Reading deaths is expected to examine issues of whether the attack could have been prevented.