Suffer the Little Children

ALAMI, Ahmad Saded-Din

Doctors have always encouraged a peculiar combination of faith and trepidation inside us all, within medical circumstance we are expected to give ourselves and our loved ones over to them when at our most vulnerable. Doctors have power over both life and death, we quite literally leave our lives in their hands.

Allow me to take you back several decades and over three thousand miles, for our story begins in the Middle East, Jerusalem, 1940 .

Born in one of the oldest cities in the world, Ahmad Alami had a good start in life, for not only was he part of a highly respected family his father was the citys leading Islamic cleric, the ‘Mufti of Jerusalem’.

By the 1960s Alami was serving with the Jordanian Armed Forces, where as a member of the medical corps he most likely witnessed combat in Kuwait and Palestine. Perhaps the horrors he endured while serving were the precursor to the paranoid delusions he began to suffer.

After experiencing schizophrenic episodes and receiving electroconvulsive therapy treatment (ECT) in 1969 Alami was diagnosed as Paranoid Schizophrenic and was subsequently discharged from the army.

Determined to continue his medical career Alami then arrived in England, securing the position of doctor at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

Just two months later he relocated to Blackpool Victoria Hospital, where he was employed as a senior houseman as he trained to become an eye specialist.

It was while working in Blackpool (in the February of 1972) the despicable doctor committed the most unimaginably egregious of crimes. Upon entering the children’s ward he approached three sleeping toddlers ( Deborah Ann Carson, 4, Martin Langhorn, 2, and Nicholas Stott, 2.),and mercilessly stabbed them to death as they lay helplessly in their beds.

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The doctors quarters

A fourth child (2 year old Darren Qamar), a student nurse ( Christine Nuttall, 22) and staff nurse (Mrs. Dorothy Simpson, 49.) were also brutally attacked, yet thankfully survived their injuries.

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Crime Scene photographs

Appearing in court, hand cuffed to a police officer, Alami entered no plea. As a paranoid schizophrenic he was judged unfit to stand trial. The judge sentenced him to be detained at Broadmoor high security hospital for an indefinite length of time,

The arrest of Dr Alami

Several years later he was deported back to The Middle East. Once home in Jordan Alami wrote 25 books on Palestinian history, he also expressed an interest in studying for a PhD in London, although every application made was turned down by the UK authorities.

I’ve been unable to establish whether Ahmad Alami is still alive (he would be eighty years old by now.) Hopefully he has gone to meet his maker to receive the wrath and retribution of final judgement.