UK sentences youngest far-right terrorist

By Muhammad Mussa

LONDON (AA) - The UK’s youngest far-right terror offender was sentenced on Monday to a two-year rehabilitation order after confessing to 12 terrorist offences.

The 16-year-old boy had been the leader of the UK branch of the outlawed neo-Nazi terrorist group Feuerkrieg Division and had expressed racist views online between 2018 and 2019.

The boy had been operating from his grandmother’s house in the county of Cornwall, southwest England and had collected right-wing material to distribute to potential recruits. One recruit was Paul Dunleavy, another teenager who was jailed last year for plotting a terrorist attack.

One of the 12 offences that he committed included the downloading of a manual on how to make a bomb and the intention to carry out a genocide of all non-white people in the UK.

Judge Mark Dennis QC, who handed down the teen’s sentence, said he had entered an "online world of wicked prejudice and violent bigotry" and had “significant vulnerabilities” due to an "abnormal childhood,” the BBC quoted him as saying.​​​​​​​

Jenny Hopkins of the Crown Prosecution Service said that people following the conclusion of the case and the sentence would "rightly be disturbed that a 13-year-old should hold the most appalling neo-Nazi beliefs.”

Hopkins said that although the teenager ”claimed not to have racist views and just wanted to appear cool", the overwhelming amount of evidence presented to the court “led to him pleading guilty to possession and dissemination of terrorist material.”

It is understood that at the age of 13 the boy first joined Fascist Forge, an online neo-Nazi forum, in 2018 after he downloaded his first bomb-making manual before becoming the leader of Feuerkrieg Division.

In 2019, detectives received information that he was making a weapon and when police searched his grandmother’s home, they found a Nazi flag, racist slogan and other right-wing regalia in the garden shed.