Encryption terrorist plotted to behead police officers during parade of honour
A British boy of 14 sent thousands of online encrypted messages as he plotted the beheading of police officers in a terrorist outrage on the other side of the world.
A British boy of 14 sent thousands of online encrypted messages as he plotted the beheading of police officers in a terrorist outrage on the other side of the world.
The Blackburn teenager planned a massacre at an Anzac Day parade with an alleged Australian jihadist, a two-day hearing at Manchester Crown Court was told.
The boy, who is now 15 and was given anonymity because of his age, was sentenced to a life term after admitting one count of inciting terrorism. He will serve at least five years in custody.
The plot to murder a number of police officers at the parade in Melbourne. Victoria, earlier this year would “in all probability” have succeeded had British police not cracked the boy`s phone and alerted Australian police, the court heard.
Anzac Day, held on April 25 each year, commemorates the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps` World War One battle in Gallipoli, and this year marked its centenary.
Sentencing the teenager, Mr Justice Saunders said the youth would have “welcomed the notoriety” had the plot succeeded.
The teenager Britain`s youngest convicted terrorist comes from a “normal” family, the court heard.
But when police searched his bedroom, it proved to be far from normal. On the windowsill they found a wooden box labelled “Islamic State” in the way a teenager might carve out the name of a pop idol.
And detectives unravelled within encrypted messages a plot that Australia was just days away from experiencing a violent terrorist attack orchestrated by the schoolboy.
The court was previously told that a well-known Islamic State recruiter Abu Khaled al-Cambodi had instigated contact between the Lancashire teenager and alleged Australian jihadist Sevdet Besim, 18.
They exchanged more than 3,000 encrypted messages, including one in which the British teenager suggested Mr Besim get his “first taste of beheading” by attacking “a proper lonely person”, the court heard.
The court heard that in one of those exchanges on March 19, the teenager presented Mr Besim with three options a gun attack on the police, a car attack on the police or a knife attack on the police.
Prosecutor Paul Mr Greaney said: “Mr Besim expressed a preference for a combination of a car and knife attack and [the defendant] advised him to buy a machete and sharpen it, run over a police officer and then decapitate him.”
Mr Justice Saunders said the teenager`s life term meant he would not be released until he was considered not to be dangerous.
He said it was “chilling” that someone who was only 14 years old at the time could have become “so radicalised that he was prepared to carry out this role intending and wishing that people should die”.