He was also responsible for a second explosion that took place in east London. This area has a dense population of Asians. This time, Copeland had left a bomb in a place called Head Hollad. Although this was spotted by the public, they could not call the police in time as the bomb had already exploded.
A few days later police identified a man in Brixton who had been carrying a Head sports bag through a CCTV. Copeland planned his next attack at The Admiral Duncan, a gay pub, which was full at the time. Three people died and four needed amputations. Twenty-six people suffered serious burns, another 53 were injured.
All the attacks were aimed at the minority groups in society. David Copeland went to a comprehensive school and had passed his GCSEs and left school at 16. He had experimented with drugs and drinks and had a few brushes with the police. He had joined the British National party and then later joined the National socialist movement which is an open neo-Nazi group operating in the UK.
When the police questioned him, although he could give an accountable description of the planning and how he had carried out the attacks he could not explain, “Why?”
When the police came to arrest him at his flat he had said:
“Yeah, they where all down to me. I did them on my own.” This makes it quite clear that he has some sort of purpose by carrying out these attacks even if they did come from his unconscious mind.
The reasons for his behaviour in these particular cases could be described as due to the fact of his upbringing. He had claimed that since he was 12, he had sadistic thoughts about killing his classmates. Five psychiatrists had concluded that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and one had concluded that he had a personality disorder but not one that was bad enough to avoid a murder charge.
His actions could be explained with Adorno’s theory, due to the harsh upbringing and environment that he was brought up in. he could have been in harsh situations where he might have had experienced the harshness of the environment himself where people might have been prejudice or behaved inappropriately to him. These actions could be a reflection of those bad memories, or it could be his repressed feelings from his childhood being expressed on the minority groups.
The social identity theory could also be used to explain his actions. He could have considered the minority groups as the ‘out’ group and his feelings and emotions had grown to such a stage that he wanted to murder the particular people and wanted them out of the country. When he had joined the national socialist party this could have motivated him more to this idea.