Detective speaks of ‘relief’ as dangerous killer kept off the streets
Detective Inspector Mark Jenkins, of Dorset Police, says CCTV was key to capturing Amie Gray murderer.
The detective in charge of the investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of Nasen Saadi has spoken of his “relief” that the “dangerous” killer had been brought to justice.
The 21-year-old, from Croydon, has been jailed for life at Winchester Crown Court for the murder of Amie Gray on Bournemouth seafront and the attempted murder of Leanne Miles at the same location.
Detective Inspector Mark Jenkins, who led the investigation for Dorset Police, told the PA news agency that the team had no doubt that they had caught the right person.
He said: “It was relieving for us as an investigation team, but primarily on behalf of the family of Amy and for Leanne, to be able to have somebody as dangerous as Nasen Saadi brought to justice and so can’t do the same thing to anybody else.”
Mr Jenkins explained that CCTV footage had been key to identifying Saadi by tracing the route taken by the suspect captured by cameras at the scene of the killing.
He said: “Once I had the CCTV of the events, which I did have quite quickly, we tracked him through the area of West Hill in Bournemouth and were able to identify a place where he’d used his bank card to purchase some items in a shop.
“As a result of that, we found out his name and his address, and then he was arrested later the same day.”
He added: “It was a relatively simple job to find him in the Nisa store making a purchase and that was the breakthrough that we needed to give us a name and an address.”
Mr Jenkins explained that analysis of Saadi’s computer and inquiries about his bank transactions enabled them to find out more about his movements and where he had been staying in Bournemouth.
However, he said the murder weapon and Saadi’s clothes were never discovered because of the amount of planning the defendant had put into the killing.
He said: “He planned to come to Bournemouth to commit this, this horrible crime, and he’d also planned to get away with it.
“So therefore he’d taken everything that he used away with him. So it was never in that Bournemouth area.
“It was, I believe, discarded between the railway station in Croydon and his home address.”
Mr Jenkins said that the biggest difficulty at the start of the investigation was mobilising enough officers to examine the large amounts of CCTV to be checked.
He explained: “The main challenge really was communication with the investigation team and making sure that we stayed focused once we’d identified him in the West Hill area earlier in the day.”
He added: “We were always confident that we had the right person.
“As the investigation unfolded, the evidence just became stronger and stronger – and there was never really anything that made us doubt or that gave us cause to doubt that we had the right person.”
Mr Jenkins said that Saadi had never revealed a motive for the attacks which he had kept secret by not giving evidence at his trial.
He said: “It seems a completely random attack, he had no connection to Amy or Leanne whatsoever and there is nothing that they did that provoked him to do what he did to them.
“So the question of motive is one for him really, he’s never revealed what that motive is.
“He didn’t give evidence during the trial, that would have been an opportunity, perhaps, to have asked him what his motivation was, but I don’t know what it is, and it’s not really a feature of the investigation.”
