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| Buckingham Palace wall scaled by convicted killer | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| A man who has admitted scaling Buckingham Palace's wall last week is a convicted murderer, a court has heard. | |
| Dennis Hennessy, 41, of Wembley, north-west London, pleaded guilty to one count of trespass on a protected site and one count of criminal damage. | |
| He admitted the charges at Westminster Magistrates' Court, where he was jailed for four months. | |
| The court heard how he had been on licence after being convicted of the murder of a homeless man in 1992. | |
| Hennessy cut his right hand as he climbed over the top of the wall, which is between 8ft to 10ft high, and set the alarm off. | |
| He had walked around the palace gardens for about 10 minutes before his arrest, the court heard. | |
| 'Is Ma'am in?' | |
| Hennessy told police he had "walked through the gardens admiring the view". | |
| Prosecutor Tom Nicholson told the court that he had repeatedly asked "is Ma'am in?" as he was detained. | |
| Chief magistrate, senior district judge Howard Riddle, sentenced him to four months for trespassing and two months, to run concurrently, for damaging the wires of the alarm system. | |
| There have been several security breaches at Buckingham Palace in the past, including the case of Michael Fagan, who got into the Queen's bedroom in 1982 and spent 10 minutes talking to her before she managed to raise the alarm when he asked for a cigarette. | |
| 'Past failures' | |
| BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt said it was "interesting" police had not yet announced a review of the incident. | |
| He said: "The police view this as a success, because there have been some very sorry failures in the past. I think they believe that apprehending an individual within seven minutes is good. | |
| "There were many critics at the time yesterday who said it wasn't, and that any period of time after someone gets over the wall is a threat. | |
| "But I think the police view was that he didn't get into any public area of the palace, he was just in the garden, he was apprehended and he didn't have a weapon." | |
| In 2003, Daily Mirror journalist Ryan Parry exposed security flaws by getting a job as a footman at the palace using a false reference. | |
| In 2013, a man scaled a fence and was arrested inside the palace. He was found at about 22:20 BST in a room which had been open to the public in the daytime. | |
| Last year two men got on to the palace roof and unveiled a banner in a protest over fathers' rights. |