Britain’s youngest terrorist given life sentence for plotting Anzac Day terror

The Blackburn teenager will serve at least five years for inciting terrorism and will only be released once he is no longer considered to be unsafe.

Dominic Casciani, BBC home affairs correspondent, said the five-year minimum term was a “window of opportunity” to see if the boy can be deradicalised before he is then moved into the adult prison system.

A 14-year-old boy groomed into becoming a “deeply committed extremist” would have been “pleased” if his plot to murder police officers in Australia had succeeded, a judge said today.

Manchester Crown Court heard he was initially arrested by police on suspicion of making threats to kill his teacher.

“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”.

He sent thousands of online messages to an alleged Australian jihadist and was planning “a massacre”, the court heard.

The judge said it was “chilling” that someone so young could be so radicalized that he was prepared to see people die.

The attack in Melbourne would have allegedly been carried out by his 18-year-old accomplice Sevdet Besim, an Australian national, during Anzac Day, when the country marks the First World War battle in Gelibolu (Gallipoli), Turkey.

But it has emerged that the boy, who can not be named for legal reasons, had been radicalised and recruited online by Australian Isil fanatic Abu Khaled al-Cambodi.

Arguing for a lenient sentence, Pickup said the defendant, who pleaded guilty in July to inciting terrorism overseas, accepted his crimes were “barbaric, immoral and wholly wrong”.

The court heard Besim was friends with Numan Haider, who he also had met at the centre, the latter known to police and would later be shot by officers after an attack outside the Melbourne police station earlier this year.

Justice Saunders said the boy had made “considerable progress” at a detention center, where he is on a United Kingdom government program designed “to de-radicalize him”.

He hugged his parents after sentence was passed down before he was led from the courtroom to begin his sentence.

In a statement after the sentencing, local police said there was no suggestion the boy was looking to target his local community in the UK.