A 52-year-old man who broke into Buckingham Palace told police he didn’t know where he was and was just looking for somewhere to pee.
Thuraisingham Kumanaraj climbed over gates at the royal London residence in August last year and managed to reach the courtyard.
He set off the security system at 9.30pm and police took ‘around four minutes’ to arrive at the scene’, The Sun reports.
Asked what he was doing, Kumanaraj told officers he hadn’t realised where he was and was only looking for somewhere to urinate.
But police seized his phone and discovered he had been searching online for Buckingham Palace as well as members of the royal family.
Appearing at Westminster Magistrates earlier this month, Kumanaraj admitted to trespassing on a protected site.
Prosecutor Frances McCormack told magistrates: ‘He claimed in interview the reason he entered the location was to urinate and denied knowing the site was, in fact, Buckingham Palace.’
Just a month after the Buckingham Palace incident, Kumanaraj was caught urinating outside a primary school in Brick Lane, east London.
He then assaulted four police officers, punching one of them on the chin and throat.
Two days after that, he tried to steal a woman’s handbag, grabbing it from around her neck, then dragging her across the ground outside Epping Station in north London.
Kumanaraj admitted four counts of assaulting an emergency worker. He denied a charge of attempted theft but was later found guilty and convicted.
He received a suspended prison sentence, was tagged for six months, banned from going near protected sites and ordered to undergo rehabilitation.
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In 2019 a 22-year-old man scaled the fence of Buckingham Palace in the early hours of the morning and got just metres away from the Queen.
The intruder was banging on doors in an attempt to get inside the palace as the head of state slept in her bedroom.
Probably the most famous Buckingham Palace break-in, however, was in 1982, when unemployed labourer Michael Fagan climbed over the palace walls and got into the Queen’s bedroom.
The monarch pushed the panic button by her bed but got no response while the 31-year-old schizophrenic began talking about his family problems.
She phoned the switchboard but the operator thought it was a prank and couldn’t have been the Queen herself.
Fagan smashed a glass ashtray and threatened to cut his wrists with it as he sat on the end of the Queen’s bed.
The monarch’s long-time aide Paul Whybrew eventually arrived, calmed him down before wrestling him to the ground.
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