Ian Watkins told ‘this is what paedophiles deserve’ during stabbing, court hears

A prisoner who stabbed Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins to death said he told the singer “this is what paedophiles deserve” before slashing his throat, a court has heard.

Watkins was attacked in his cell at high-security HMP Wakefield on October 11 last year.

Convicted murderer Rico Gedel, 25, told a court he hated sharing a wing with sex offenders at the jail, and had openly threatened to assault “any number of paedophiles” if he was not transferred.

Gedel said he had decided to “stab someone” in order to get moved off the wing, and chose Watkins, who was in the cell next to him, due to “proximity”.

He told the court he felt he had been “set up” by prison officers who knew how much he hated paedophiles, and said they were “just as much to blame as I am”.

Gedel also said Watkins had used racial slurs to him the night before the fatal attack, after he started verbally abusing him through the cell walls.

He told Leeds Crown Court jurors he had a hatred of sex offenders because he had family members who had been sexually assaulted, adding: “The reason I feel so disgusted about sexual assault is …It’s not something you can take away.

“It’s something people live with for the rest of their lives.”

Gedel said he made a point of finding out who the sex offenders were on his wing when he was moved to HMP Wakefield because “I’m in a prison I generally don’t want to be in surrounded by people I don’t want to be 10ft near”.

He said he had only had three interactions with Watkins, including one when they were on the same wing earlier that year, when he verbally abused the former singer through his cell door, calling him a “dirty paedo and a scumbag”.

He told the court: “At first he was just a bit coy and cocky, like ‘ah, you don’t know who I am’,” but “eventually turned racist”.

He said Watkins called him a “shitstain” and told him: “Get away from my door, this is a n** free zone’.”

Gedel said he was moved back onto the same wing as Watkins the night before the fatal attack after he assaulted three prisoners on another wing, claiming one of them “was selling baby photos and boasting about him being a paedophile”.

He said the night he was moved, he heard the inmate next door telling a prison officer he “needed a photo printed off of a female” and found out that it was Watkins.

“As soon as I knew it was Watkins I started giving him verbal and he started giving verbal back,” Gedel said.

He told the court he called Watkins a scumbag and a paedophile, and Watkins responded with “a lot of racial slurs”.

Gedel said that the next morning he was given the makeshift knife used in the attack by Samuel Dodsworth after telling him that he needed a weapon.

“There was no other option than to cause violence to get off the wing,” Gedel said.

“It was going through my head, who would be the best target. I was feeling like no-one would listen to me.”

He said he started to say to himself “get on with it, just do it, just stab someone” and that Watkins “came into my thought process,” adding that it was “probably just proximity”.

Gedel said: “I went into his cell… I stabbed him in his neck. I slashed him, it was not a poking motion, it was a slicing motion.

“Blood immediately didn’t come out. Then I slashed his ear, but I didn’t think I got his ear, I thought I got his cheek.

“Then I slashed him again. That’s when he started bleeding.”

He said that he told Watkins: “This is what paedophiles deserve.”

Asked if Watkins replied, Gedel said: “No, I don’t think he could speak. It was like a mumbled scream.”

He told the court he felt “sad about having to go to those extremes,” and thought: “Is this what it takes to get off the wing?”

Asked by his barrister Peter Moulson KC if he wanted to kill Watkins, Gedel said: “Some part of me did, yes.”

He said: “Yes,” when asked if some part of him did not.

Gedel told the court: “Sometimes what we are thinking is not what we intend to do.

“Sometimes what your heart wants is not what your brain wants.

“I don’t think much, I’m not a thinker… sometimes my impulse is not what I want.

“My heart was saying ‘he deserves it, he’s a paedophile. Think of your family members, think of his victims’. My brain was saying ‘it’s not the thing to do’.”

Gedel said he believed he was set up because “prison officers knew I was a violent person, they knew I was going to commit this act”.

He told jurors: “When I first came to the prison, I said if I don’t get transferred within six months I’m going to commit an act of violence.

“Every prison officer I interacted with I told them my disgust of sex offenders.”

Gedel said that after he assaulted the man he claimed was “selling baby photos” he told officers: “I need to get transferred or this is going to continue to happen.”

He added: “I don’t like sex offenders, I hate them, I despise them.

“I’m not here to prove my innocence, I admit to what’s happened, whether that was the intention or not, I take full responsibility for what’s happened.

“But the prison officers are just as much to blame as I am.”

Gedel said that he had grown up in and around west London and was taken into care at the age of three after his mother burned him with a kettle.

He told the court he was excluded from school in Year 7 for carrying a weapon, but that he “came from a rough background” and “had to take that risk to protect myself”.

Gedel said he started selling drugs from the age of 11 in order to make ends meet.

He said that he was “wrongly convicted” for murder in 2023 and that there was “lots of evidence he never had a weapon” during that attack.

Jurors were told that prosecutors in that case could not identify which of three men inflicted the fatal wound, but Gedel was sentenced on the basis that it was a joint attack and intended to kill.

Gedel said the conviction had affected him “immensely,” telling jurors: “When you get found guilty for a crime you haven’t committed and you have to spend the rest of your life in prison, you have no hope, you have no future.

“The things you learned along the way you have to throw them in the bin.

“All your hopes and dreams, you have to throw them in the bin.”

He said he had been assaulted by other prisoners and prison officers since being in custody, and had sometimes carried a weapon because it was “necessary”.

Gedel, who was initially referred to by police as Rashid Gedel, and Dodsworth both deny murder and possession of a makeshift knife in prison.

Watkins was jailed for 29 years in December 2013, with a further six years on licence, after admitting a string of sex offences – including the attempted rape of a fan’s baby.

The trial continues.