A criminology student accused of fatally stabbing a sports coach on a Dorset beach told a prison officer he was fascinated with knives, a jury has heard.
Nasen Saadi, 20, is said to have told the officer that he liked the shape and look of knives and had a collection of about six at his home in south London.
Saadi is accused of the murder of Amie Gray and the attempted murder of her friend Leanne Miles on a Bournemouth beach at night in May. He denies both charges.
Benjamin Raffo, a prison officer at HMP Winchester, told Winchester crown court that during a welfare assessment after Saadi’s arrest at the start of June, Saadi was asked what he felt about knives.
Raffo told the jury: “He said he was fascinated by them. He liked the shape and look of them. He had approximately six of them at home.”
He said they spoke about Bournemouth beach. “He said he had been there. We asked him if he had any knowledge of who the victims were. He said he did not know them. He accepted he was in Bournemouth but did not accept he was anywhere near where the crime took place.”
Raffo said they discussed attempts by police to access Saadi’s mobile phone. The officer said: “He stated to us his phone had an alphanumeric password [a combination of letters and numbers] because they are the most difficult passwords to crack.
“And that’s exactly why he put it on his phone. It was the first element of what could be determined as cockiness that I had seen from Nasen. It seemed to me he had put some research into what would be the hardest code to crack.”
Lisa-Maria Reiss, who taught criminology at the University of Greenwich and was a special constable with the Met police, told the court Saadi asked her so many questions about how crimes were investigated that she asked him if he was planning to commit murder. He replied that he was doing research for a newspaper article, she said.
Reiss recalled giving a lecture on political systems and said that when she finished Saadi asked her to return to a point about self-defence in murder cases.
She told the jury she was confused as she had not spoken on that subject and asked him if he had walked into the wrong classroom. She said she reported the incident to the office so they “could keep an eye on it”.
In subsequent lectures, Reiss said, Saadi asked about subjects such as how police use DNA. During a session when Reiss’s partner, Pavandeep Singh Aneja, also a special constable, came in to answer questions from students, Saadi was said to have questioned him about how police forces cooperated.
Reiss said: “He asked if different police departments in different areas communicated with each other, if they exchanged cases and evidence. He also asked how far someone would have to travel to get away with certain offences.”
The jury has heard that Saadi lived in Purley, more than 100 miles from Bournemouth.
Reiss said Saadi’s questions were different to those of most students. “The questions were not necessarily focused on anything to do with careers, anything to do with the life of a police officer,” she said. “It was more from the other side. It was the interactions with the police, it was very focused on DNA, how to get away with murder.”
Saadi’s barrister, Charles Sherrard KC, asked Reiss if the defendant was easy to deal with. She replied: “He definitely wasn’t.”
The trial continues.
