British court hears psych testimony after man admits manslaughter in knife killings

Paul Godfrey
·2 min read
UPI
Valdo Calocane, a Nottingham University mechanical engineering graduate, denied murder but pled guilty to manslaughter due to diminished capacity for a killing spree in Nottingham last year that claimed the lives of two freshman students and a janitor. Photo courtesy Nottinghamshire Police

Jan. 24 (UPI) -- British psychiatrists testified in court Wednesday in the case of a mechanical engineer who stabbed three people to death in a rampage in the city of Nottingham last year, a day after he pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished capacity.

Valdo Calocane, 32, who killed Nottingham University students Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar, both 19, and 65-year-old school janitor Ian Coates and attempted to kill three other people by driving into them in June, will not be tried for murder after prosecutors accepted he was mentally ill.

Nottingham Crown Court is hearing pre-sentencing psychiatric reports on Calocane who has a history of mental illness but no criminal record, although he was wanted at the time of the killings in connection with an assault on a police officer in 2022.

On Tuesday, prosecutor Karim Khalil KC told the court of the "brutally efficient" way the former University of Nottingham student dispatched his three victims.

"It is clear that he assaulted Mr. Coates with the same brutal efficiency that he had used against Grace and Barnaby. [A witness] was asleep in his bedroom in a detached house at the junction of Lucknow Drive and Magdala Road. At about 5 a.m. he awoke to the sounds of what he describes as repeated, 'blood-curdling screaming' and someone shouting, 'leave me.'"

The court also heard how Kumar, a keen amateur athlete, "heroically" tried to protect her friend Webber by attempting to fight off Calocane after he was stabbed which resulted in him turning on her.

Calocane, who was born in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa and came to Britain via Portugal, believed he was under surveillance by the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6 and had been "sectioned" under the Mental Health Act on at least three occasions in 2020 and 2021 but failed to take anti-psychotic medication prescribed to him before disappearing from authorities' radar in 2022, Khalil told the court.

The incident in the early hours of June 13, sparked a major police operation in the city, 150 miles north of London, that continued through the day even after police tasered and arrested Calocane and added to an ongoing national debate over knife crime which kills almost 300 people a year, according to the Ben Kinsella Trust.