Appearing at London’s Old Bailey court on Monday, the 27-year-old Uber driver Mohiussunnath Chowdhury denied plotting terrorist acts saying, only that the Queen was the enemy "that Allah tells us to fight," the BBC reported.
“Kill Them Without Mercy”
"The Queen and her soldiers will all be in the hellfire, they go to war with Muslims around the world and kill them without any mercy," Chowdhury allegedly wrote in a suicide note, sent to his sister on the day he was arrested.
He also changed his social media profile picture to a green bird, in a sign he was going to become a martyr, jurors were told.
Opening the trial, prosecutor Tim Cray said that on the evening of Friday, August 25, 2017, Chowdhury was driving outside Buckingham Palace in central London.
A police van was parked on the other side of the road.
"As the defendant got up to where the police van was coming towards him, he swerved his car through the traffic cones designed to keep the two lanes of traffic apart," Cray said.
He added that two officers got out of the van thinking the driver was drunk or on drugs, he added.
As the officers approached him, Chowdhury allegedly pulled out a 42-inch (1.06 meter) sword.
A “short, desperate struggle” ensued with the officers “trying to get the sword off the defendant while he is punching at them and they are punching at him," Cray recalled.
One policeman suffered a cut to his palm and another cut to his hand before they used CS gas to disarm the attacker.
According to the officers, Mohiussunnath Chowdhury shouted "Allahu Akbar" ("God is the greatest") as he was being arrested.
In recent years, Britain has been hit by a series of terror attacks. In June, 2017, a van drove into a group of Muslim worshipers in London’s Finsbury Park during the holy month of Ramadan.
READ MORE: Police Defend Inaction After London Attacker Seen In Jihadist Documentary
A 47-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of terrorism offenses.
Earlier that same month, seven people were killed and 48 were injured when a van hit pedestrians on London Bridge. Three men got out of the vehicle and started stabbing passers-by before being shot dead by police.
On May 22, 2017, an attack in Manchester left 22 people dead and injured 59 others after a suicide bomber targeted children and young adults at the end of a concert at the Manchester Arena by US singer Ariana Grande.
The bomber, Salman Ramadan Abedi, 22, was born in Manchester to Libyan parents.