A video has emerged of a masked man waving a crossbow and vowing to “assassinate the Queen” as revenge for killings at a protest in British India over 100 years ago, allegedly published just minutes before a 19-year-old was arrested in the grounds of the castle where Elizabeth II was celebrating Christmas.
The one-minute video, allegedly sent on WhatsApp to a group of contacts of Jaswant Singh Chail — named by several media outlets as the individual arrested Christmas Day after someone broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle while the Queen was in residence — has been published by British tabloid newspaper The Sun.
Nobody has been officially named in relation to the investigation as of the time of publication, however.
State broadcaster the BBC stated on Monday morning that British police were aware of the video and investigating its contents but declined to formally link it to the arrested 19-year-old man.
The apparently pre-recorded video is alleged to have been uploaded to WhatsApp 24 minutes before a man was arrested in the grounds of Windsor Castle. It shows a masked man holding a crossbow ranting in a heavily distorted voice that he was “sorry… [for] what I will do”, which he said would be an “attempt to assassinate Elizabeth, Queen of the Royal Family.”
The hooded and masked individual said that the attempted assassination was to be in “revenge for those who have died in the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre”, better known in Britain as the Amristar Massacre.
The Queen was born in 1926.
The man said his attack was “also revenge for those who have been killed, humiliated and discriminated on because of their race. I’m an Indian Sikh”.
The shooting of Indian nationalist, pro-independence protesters by British soldiers over a century ago remains a sore point in Anglo-Indian relations, and former British prime minister David Cameron visited Amristar in 2013, laying a wreath at the site and calling the vents “deeply shameful”.
A contemporary report noted that the then-Prime Minister had pointed out that the British government had “rightly condemned” the massacre at the time it occurred, and that, consequently, he did not “think the right thing is to reach back into history and to seek out things that we should apologise for. I think the right thing to do is to acknowledge what happened, to recall what happened, to show respect and understanding for what happened”.
Bizarrely, in the final spoken part of the crossbow video, the masked man made several references to Hollywood franchise Star Wars, and a still image from one of the series’ characters can be seen in the background.
As Breitbart London reported at the time of the arrest, the man arrested at Windsor Castle said to have entered the grounds by scaling a fence with a rope ladder while armed.
Reports suggest the nearest he got to the Queen’s private apartment within the castle was a third of a mile (500m).
A security source said of the arrest: “Security controllers monitoring the CCTV couldn’t believe their eyes when they spotted the man carrying what appeared to be a crossbow and scrambled armed police to the scene immediately as a top-level emergency… A full-scale protection plan was executed to ensure the safety of the Queen, who was in her personal quarters.”
The 19-year-old has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act after being arrested on suspicion of trespass on a protected site and possessing an offensive weapon.
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