Lancashire teenager used smartphone to win 24,000 Twitter followers and encourage Isis recruits over Anzac Day plot
The UK’s youngest convicted terrorist has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of five years for plotting the Anzac Day beheading of Australian police officers when he was just 14.
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, used his first smartphone to forge a celebrity status among online jihadis from his home in Blackburn, Lancashire, and made contact with a notorious Islamic State recruiter currently fighting in Syria.
Now aged 15, in July he pleaded guilty to inciting terrorism overseas, sending thousands of messages to a Melbourne man and concocting a plot to kill police officers at Australia’s memorial day parade.
Sentencing him at Manchester crown court on Friday, Mr Justice Saunders said it was “chilling” that a defendant so young had been “hoping and intending that the outcome would be the deaths of a number of people. Had the authorities not intervened, [the defendant] would have continued to play his part.
“In March 2015 he would have been pleased if that had happened. He would have welcomed the notoriety that he would have achieved,” the judge said.
The boy will remain in prison until he is deemed to present no further risk to the public.
DCI Tony Mole, who led the counter-terrorism unit investigation, said the defendant’s involvement in something so serious at such a young age had deeply shocked him. “It is a warning to teenagers, the seduction of this [Isis] message can be very compelling. You can almost self-radicalise because you will go deeper and deeper,” he said.
Socially awkward at school, where he was nicknamed “the terrorist”, the teenager’s parents were divorced and he suffered from a degenerative eye condition. But online, he constructed a fantastical identity, amassing 24,000 Twitter followers in just two weeks and operating almost 90 different accounts sharing Isis propaganda and other extreme material.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/02/uk-schoolboy-life-sentence-australia-terror-plot
The UK’s youngest convicted terrorist has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of five years for plotting the Anzac Day beheading of Australian police officers when he was just 14.
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, used his first smartphone to forge a celebrity status among online jihadis from his home in Blackburn, Lancashire, and made contact with a notorious Islamic State recruiter currently fighting in Syria.
Now aged 15, in July he pleaded guilty to inciting terrorism overseas, sending thousands of messages to a Melbourne man and concocting a plot to kill police officers at Australia’s memorial day parade.
Sentencing him at Manchester crown court on Friday, Mr Justice Saunders said it was “chilling” that a defendant so young had been “hoping and intending that the outcome would be the deaths of a number of people. Had the authorities not intervened, [the defendant] would have continued to play his part.
“In March 2015 he would have been pleased if that had happened. He would have welcomed the notoriety that he would have achieved,” the judge said.
The boy will remain in prison until he is deemed to present no further risk to the public.
DCI Tony Mole, who led the counter-terrorism unit investigation, said the defendant’s involvement in something so serious at such a young age had deeply shocked him. “It is a warning to teenagers, the seduction of this [Isis] message can be very compelling. You can almost self-radicalise because you will go deeper and deeper,” he said.
Socially awkward at school, where he was nicknamed “the terrorist”, the teenager’s parents were divorced and he suffered from a degenerative eye condition. But online, he constructed a fantastical identity, amassing 24,000 Twitter followers in just two weeks and operating almost 90 different accounts sharing Isis propaganda and other extreme material.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/02/uk-schoolboy-life-sentence-australia-terror-plot
this is the first time i ever heard of someone this young being capable of doing something like this
