A British man jailed for trying to snatch a policeman’s gun at a Donald Trump rally has said he heard voices telling him to kill.
Michael Sandford, 21, made a grab for the weapon at a Las Vegas casino where the tycoon was addressing supporters in the run-up to the US presidential election.
Speaking after his return to the UK on Thursday, nearly five months into a year-long sentence, he said he was hearing voices at the time of the incident.
“They’d been coming on for a while and getting stronger and more frequent. At one point they were screaming at me,” he told The Sun.
“My friends had said Trump needed to be stopped. They said he was going to destroy the country — but it was the voices in my head which were telling me to kill him.
“Then one day I saw he was speaking in Las Vegas and I decided to drive there and do something myself.”
Sandford has autism, suffers from a number of mental health problems and was diagnosed as having had a psychotic episode at the time of the incident, in June.
He was sentenced at a court in Las Vegas in December to 12 months in jail after pleading guilty to charges of being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm and disrupting an official function.
He described US prison as terrifying and said he was locked in his cell “most of the time”.
Sandford was released less than halfway through the sentence, despite fears Trump might seek to intervene and either keep him in jail for longer or block his return to the UK.
He said being reunited with his family was an amazing feeling. “There were times when I thought I might never see them again,” he added.