Fanatic who tried to kill police officers had once been a star student who seemed 'so kind'

SUNLIGHT strikes the curtainless windows of the one-bedroom flat that Alexander Dighton called home.

- CONOR GOGARTY

“He lived here two and a half years and he never put curtains in,” says one of his old neighbours in the social housing estate. “That was Alex.’

Shortly before 7pm on January 31, while clad in body armour, Dighton approached Talbot Green police station in Rhondda Cynon Taf with a knife, hatchet and wooden pole.

The 28-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at a police van, which did not ignite, but he then managed to set another police van alight using petrol.

He smashed the van’s windows with the pole - which had metal attached to the end - before turning his attention to a group of officers who had arrived on the scene.

Neither a Taser nor pepper spray could stop Dighton as he launched a frenzied attack on the officers.

He swung the pole at one, punched another to the head and stabbed a third to the leg before finally being restrained.

Two of the officers needed hospital treatment.

Dighton later pleaded guilty to 10 charges - among them the attempted murder of DC Jack Cotton - and was remanded in custody ahead of next month's sentencing.

There has yet to be a detailed explanation of the motive.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service, the attack had “a terrorist connection” in that Dighton subscribed to an “anti-government ideology’

There was perhaps a further hint in Dighton’s words to the Old Bailey judge: “Authority is not my problem. It’s the use of authority which to me is the problem, the use of authority I have seen since I was 15.”

We don’t know what happened when Dighton was 15. What we do know is that he looked to be on a very different path in his youth.

‘At the age of 18 he won a Wales-wide competition in advanced mechanical engineering for his computer-aided design of a wobbler engine.

Our sister paper The Western Mail ran a short piece on Dighton’s achievement and he told us he had aspirations to become an engineer in the Royal Air Force.