British Teen Receives Life Sentence For Islamic State-Inspired Terror Plot

The boy may have to share the title of Britain’s youngest person convicted of terrorism-a 15-year-old girl was arrested in East London in July in a separate case of supporting terrorism, and she also awaits trial.

The boy from Blackburn, Lancashire – who was then 14 – had been groomed by Australian extremist propagandists online and had plotted a “massacre” and suicide attack on police from his bedroom.

During nine days in March he shared more than 3,000 heavily encrypted messages with fellow plotter “Illyas” in Australia, in which they discussed a plan to run over a police officer at an Anzac Day parade.

The Blackburn adolescent will serve for inciting terrorism and certainly will just be released once he’s now not regarded as risky.

A “major terrorist plot in its late stages” was thwarted when authorities in Britain and Australia intervened and Besim was arrested in possession of a knife a week before the annual remembrance event. He handed down a life sentence with no chance of parole for five years.

“Thanks to the intervention of the police in this country and in Australia, that attack and the deaths which were meant to follow never happened”, he said.

Passing down the sentence judge Justice Saunders said: “Had the authorities not intervened, (the defendant) would have continued to play his part hoping and intending that the outcome would be the deaths of a number of people”. His name has not been made public because of his age.

The youth found an online jihadist community through his first smartphone which “filled a void” caused by problems he was having at school and at home as well as a degenerative eye condition.

The court heard how the boy adopted an older persona in his messages to alleged Australian jihadist Sevdet Besim, 18, in which he instructed him to carry out an Islamic State terror group inspired attack.

He said the evidence suggested that he paid “lip service” to engage with the Government’s attempts to deradicalise him through the Channel programme. The suspect is now aged 15 but he is accused of threatening openly to behead his own teachers, telling them that “you are on my beheading list”.

The boy was arrested at his home on March 25 on suspicion of making threats to kill.