Manchester: Earlier this year, an angry teenage boy from the northern English town of Blackburn, Lancashire, texted an image to a girl he fancied. It was a single, boastful screenshot from his phone, showing a small hint of his other infatuation: his part in a terrorist conspiracy.
Clearly, it was intended to impress her. He said he wanted to marry her. But this one message of love and hate was the lucky thread that, with just days to spare, unravelled a plot to attack an Anzac Day march halfway around the world.
The story of the boy is one of last-minute detective work with an unlikely villain: a 14-year-old boy going blind, in trouble at school, fuming in his bedroom and plotting jihad on his smartphone.
The boy made a crucial mistake. And a Manchester detective made a crucial decision. And if not for these, Anzac Day 2015 may have been remembered for blood and terror on Melbourne’s Anzac Parade.
On Thursday, April 3, police arrested the boy at his home in Blackburn where he lived with his mother and siblings.
Summaries of messages UK police allege were exchanged between the boy and his Australian contact. Photo: Greater Manchester Police
It’s an unremarkable suburban house: two-storey, detached, a modest lawn out the back. Local children swim in nearby reservoirs where sailing schools run their little skiffs.
This was no terrorist hotbed. And, indeed, police were not expecting to find one. They expected, and found, a troubled boy.
The boy was born in June 2000. By late 2014 he was losing his eyesight to a degenerative condition and displaying new, disturbed behaviour at school, Manchester Crown Court heard on Thursday.
Anzac Day 2015 may have been remembered for blood and terror in Melbourne had Manchester police not uncovered a plot. Photo: Phil Hearne
In a preliminary court appearance earlier this year, Justice Saunders said one of the key things he wanted to understand before sentencing was how the boy was “indoctrinated” into terrorism. Police would later discover the ‘sharp end’ of this process, following social media exchanges as the boy was taken under the wing of senior jihadists and pushed down a path to criminality.
But they were taking advantage of a vulnerability that was already present, several experts said in documents tendered to the court.
Dr Cesar Lengua, a consultant child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist, said the boy “had difficulties in integrating with his school peer group who found his interest in Islam and his political interests excessive and misplaced”.
The photo of a knife said to have been sent to the boy by his Australian contact. Photo: Greater Manchester Police
The boy had been moved from a smaller Islamic boarding school to a bigger, secular one and he did not like it. He told another psychologist, Dr Tim Diggle, the school was “mostly white ….. I was the only Asian kid”. After a while he began to make friends, but his behaviour was deteriorating – in the boy’s words “I was rebelling, being naughty”.
He told staff he regarded Barack Obama as a murderer and was in agreement with the views of Osama Bin Laden. He said that when he was older he wanted to be a Jihadist and a martyr so he could die for a cause. Teachers believed he was acting up partly to get attention. “He always knew what he was saying or doing. It was always to get a reaction from me or the other teachers,” one said in a court statement.
The boy’s home life was also troubled – his parents had just separated. His mother said the boy was “up most nights on his iPad talking to people he had not met in person, he was also watching films and documentaries”.
Another summary of messages UK police allege were exchanged between the boy and his Australian contact. Photo: Greater Manchester Police
The boy was then moved to another school, for children with behavioural, social, emotional and learning difficulties.
This precipitated, or coincided with a dramatic decline in his behaviour. He became more angry and serious. He would throw away the eyedrops that were supposed to be saving his eyesight, telling people “I don’t need eyes where I’m going”. He began making threats to his teachers, saying he would slit their throats. He even made a list of the order in which he would cut off their heads. He would show fellow students Islamist propaganda and gruesome videos on his phone, earning the nickname ‘The Terrorist’, the court heard.
It didn’t win him any friends. He was a loner. There was a “void” in his life, counsellors said in statements tendered to the court, and that void was filled by Islamist propaganda, and a social network of IS sympathisers online who call themselves Baqiya, ‘the family’ and treated him like a celebrity.
“On what he refers to as Jihadi Twitter his articulated voice, irreverent humour and young age made him widely popular, a sort of group mascot,” Professor Alexandra Bain, an expert on radicalisation, said in a statement tendered to the court.
The boy later told a counsellor he felt that “he only existed on the internet”. Their analysis was that he was creating a fantasy image of himself, far removed from reality.
He also craved notoriety, he admitted to Dr Lengua. He thought that if he provided the appropriate guidance to another jihadist he would “become notorious and he had spoken to a planner from Tripoli who had gained fame in a similar fashion”, Dr Lengua said in a court document.
In the ‘real world’ there was a “multi-agency” intervention under way, led by the local council and involving the school, counsellors, and also police. But the boy resisted counselling, and his behaviour worsened. .
He was almost never at school, excluded because of his behaviour, and would sleep until mid-afternoon then spend all night online, reading propaganda, watching videos, and relentlessly updating his radical Twitter accounts – he churned through 89 of them, as soon as one was shut down because of its content he would simply move on to the next and his fans would follow. Within two weeks of opening his first account in January he had 24,000 followers.
One Muslim counsellor, who spoke to the boy in early January, detected the influence of others on him.
The boy “struggled with his identity and appears to have a history of feeling powerless and frustrated”, but he was “a child of articulation and consciousness, who is aware of national and international events,” the counsellor said in documents tendered in court. “This would place him in the sphere of reasoning, wisdom and maturity (precocious) beyond his years and that of his contemporaries.
“There is no doubt in my mind that he has forged his alliance with the Dola, (caliphate state/ISIS), or with affiliates thereof… where he has been radicalised to a degree where I have seen none other in my interventions thus far. He was and is of an age of impression and nurturing where a void and vacuum was capitalised upon and invaded by the likes of (such people).”
“The void and vacuum may have been created by his frustration of the pending loss of his eyesight (inability of the medics to restore the same and treat him), parental issues, national and international events, referral to the current school, where he sees no logic in him being there, and the perceived failures of the seminaries that he attended … who made no effort to addressing his spiritual wellbeing.”
By late March 2015, Lancashire police decided enough was enough. They were unaware of the extent of the boy’s online activities but based on his behaviour at school were considering charging him with “making threats to kill”, and let the justice system take its course.
An officer came to the boy’s house to arrest him, but the boy made no reply and walked upstairs, the court was told. Officers followed him, and asked him where his phone was. The boy lifted the mattress to his bed and said, “It’s under here, I hid it when I knew the police were here”. He then took out a white Samsung Galaxy handset and handed it to the officer.
When police examined the phone, at first the contents were what they expected. “Significant extremist content” was one assessment.
The phone’s wallpaper was Islamic State fighters. There were three copies of Dabiq, the IS English language magazine aimed explicitly at recruiting fighters, riddled with anti-Semitism, oversaturated images and propaganda: “The time has come for those generations that were drowning in oceans of disgrace … to rise”.
There were some suspicious Google searches on the phone – the boy had looked into IS and travel overseas and how to send money abroad. In February he’d googled homemade explosives, nitro-glycerine, Blackburn police station, comedy festival Blackburn, Blackburn Cathedral, aerodrome, synagogues in Manchester, even BAE (a British defence manufacturer sited near Blackburn).
But there was no sign the boy had followed through with anything – he hadn’t tried to acquire weapons or chemicals, he hadn’t gone to reconnoitre potential targets. He didn’t even have a passport, so it was unlikely he was heading to Syria.
A screen shot said to have been from an exchange between “Illyas” and the boy.
A screen shot said to have been from an exchange between “Illyas” and the boy. Photo: Greater Manchester Police
“They were just basic internet searches, there’s no substance behind them,” one detective said.
But there was one other image. It appeared to be a screenshot of a fragment of a conversation in a messaging app, an exchange with someone called “Illyas”. This – though police did not know at the time – was the screenshot the boy had taken in order to send it to the girl he adored.
One line caught the eye of police: “So far the plan is to run a cop over or the anzac parade & then continue to kill a cop then take ghanimah [spoils of war] and run to shahadah [martyrdom]?”.
A digital copy of Dabig magazine said to have been found on the boy’s smartphone.
A digital copy of Dabig magazine said to have been found on the boy’s smartphone. Photo: Greater Manchester Police
And the reply: “ill give orders soon but its looking along that line”.
It was cryptic, but ominous. The North West Counter Terrorism Unit rummaged through the phone’s hidden corners. They tried several different off-the-shelf software packages, but nothing new turned up.
Then one officer made a crucial, possibly life-saving offer. He proposed to design and develop bespoke software to break into Telegram, an app on the phone that encrypted its messages against prying eyes.
It took more than a fortnight to get right. Then, just one week before Anzac Day, that officer cracked it, and a 3000 message-long conversation started spooling out.
As soon as the team saw it, they knew the case had suddenly become much more serious. The boy had been seeking to mastermind a terror plot in Australia. His exchange with “Illyas” was focused on a plan to attack an Anzac Day parade in Melbourne using a car and a knife.
There was no time to lose.
“We saw the basics of the messaging and we started emailing the Australians [federal police] before we’d even read it all,” Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Mole, head of the NW CTU, said.
“Once we’d got into the messaging we quickly worked out there was something sinister going on and we started almost drip-feeding the Aussies by email saying ‘look this is what we’ve found, this is what we’ve seen’.”
The exchange uncovered on the phone began with ‘Illyas’ saying “I am the brother from Australia”.
The two had been introduced through a process that began late the previous year, the court was told on Thursday. The boy had gone to meet an infamous UK hate preacher (who cannot be named for legal reasons), who advised him to keep in contact by opening a Twitter account. Within a week of joining Twitter, the boy was in contact with ‘Abu Kambozz’, also known as al-Cambodi.
This was an ISIS propagandist and recruiter from Australia who at the time was operating out of Raqqa in Syria. Al-Cambodi took advantage of the boy’s trust, talking with him almost every day in a way the boy later described as like an older brother, asking for favours and giving advice.
Al-Cambodi then told the boy about a “brother in Australia who wished to carry out a terrorist attack but needed a guide or mentor”, the court heard. The boy volunteered to act as this man’s guide. The man, who appears in evidence tendered to the court under the pseudonym “Illyas”, was identified in court as Melbourne man Sevdet Besim.
Over an intense nine days, the pair allegedly hatched and matured their plot to attack an Anzac Day parade, to behead a policeman, take their gun and seek martyrdom.
But in court on Thursday Justice John Saunders said most details of the terror plot appeared to have come from Besim, not the boy.
“The role (the boy) played, which may be a significant role in lone wolf attacks, was moral support, encouragement to go ahead with it, giving justification for it and giving some practical advice when needed,” Justice Saunders said.
At one stage during their exchange, the pair watched an online video featuring a frontline ISIS commander. The boy then wrote “Cant wait till my op. After hundreds of plans I can plan my own.”
But the next operation was by police. In near-simultaneous raids on April 18, British and Australian police arrested the boy and individuals alleged to be the plotters he was communicating with in Australia.
Once arrested, the boy cooperated with police – and in July he pleaded guilty to one count of inciting a terrorist attack.
On Friday, he was sentenced to life in prison. He will serve a minimum of five years, and will only be released if he is no longer considered a threat to the public.
But police say, beyond the specifics of this case, it holds a warning for all parents and young people. “I find it sad and shocking that somebody of that age can get themselves involved in something so serious,” said Chief Superintendent Mole. “For me it is a warning to teenagers. We know how volatile teenagers can be and they all have their own personal issues [but] this ISIL message, it is a seductive message, it can be very compelling.
“Once you get into the internet I think you can almost self-radicalise … you’ll go deeper and deeper and you’ll find stuff. If you do the right searches you’ll find stuff that you’re susceptible to and you’re open to and you’ll find more of it and you can almost normalise it and actually believe it. And it’s dangerous.”
source:smh.com.au
STUDIO 3 NEWCASTLE AUSTRALIA 