'You're not planning a murder?' How the killer researched his attack

Most young people who study criminology at the University of Greenwich in south London do so in the hope of getting a job in the police or perhaps probation or the Prison Service.

- Steven Morris Rachel Hall Jamie Grierson

But when Nasen Saadi suddenly switched courses and began to study the subject in the autumn of 2023, he did so with a different motive.

Over the academic year, Saadi repeatedly asked questions about how a murderer might get away with killing, how crime scenes were examined, and how police forces worked together if an offence was committed far from where the perpetrator lived. He sourced knives, analysed notorious murders and pinpointed a location for his murder.

In May he travelled by train from his home in south London to Bournemouth and tested – in real life – whether it was possible to kill and escape undetected.

The murder plan seems to have begun to take shape when Saadi, then 19, walked late into a session on the UK's political system being led by the criminology lecturer Lisa-Maria Reiss in October 2023. He had just switched from a physical education course.

At the end of the lecture he took off his headphones and asked: "Going back to the point about self-defence for murder… could you plead self-defence if you were attacked first?" He also asked about how long DNA remained and how it was analysed.

Reiss, a Met police special constable as well as an academic, was taken aback as crime had not been the subject of her lecture and asked him: "You're not planning a murder, are you?" He replied that he was doing research for a newspaper but Reiss was so worried she reported his behaviour within the university.

Reiss said Saadi was difficult to deal with, often appearing to ignore her when she answered him, and that he tried to provoke female classmates, saying that women were weaker than men, that they shouldn't work in certain jobs, and that police work was not for them.