127 Further, since one of the purposes of criminalizing such behaviour is to frustrate terrorist acts in their infancy, in assessing the gravity of the offence, it must also be proper to have regard to whether the terrorist act in question was ever going to be committed. While most of the outward signs are that Mr Besim would have tried to go through with the planned murder, for reasons that follow, I entertain the possibility that he might have pulled out. While he had effectively left a suicide note for his family, which, along with the tenor of most of his conversations with S, suggested a fixed resolve to attempt to carry out his gruesome plan to its inevitable end, there are suggestions, perhaps faint but they are there, in their conversation from 2:23 p.m. on 23 March 2015 that Mr Besim was setting up an excuse for abandoning his planned "operation" in the event that he weakened. For example, he mused that, if pulled over in his car by police, he could be charged with offences concerning his possession of things such as a knife, a Taser, a machete and a shahadah flag, and that that might land him in gaol for two years, which "would obviously stop [his operation]". Then, as if to make sure that S understood that this could happen, he repeated - unnecessarily and a little tellingly, it seems to me - that "this is a possibility"; that this was "just a heads up"; and that "[r]aids [are] also a possibility"; but that he hoped none of this would happen and that the operation would "go to plan". I should add that, in the next breath, Mr Besim quipped that, if he were pulled over, he would "stab the dogs and go on a rampage". And, later, the conversation returned to the disturbing detail of how the planned killing might occur, with S cautioning of the difficulty of decapitation, "especially ... in public". But, as I say, these and other remarks in the same conversation suggest to me the reasonable possibility that Mr Besim recognized in himself that, despite his resolve to murder a police officer in the name of violent jihad, when it came to the appointed day, the natural human inclination to self-preservation, if not a reluctance to kill another human being, might cause him to abandon his ultimate plan and hope that he was arrested for some lesser offence, which in turn might still allow him to save face.