Chilling picture urging jihadists to kill George
Fanatic posted sick image online and plotted World Cup attack
A JIHADIST who circulated a chilling image encouraging IS supporters to kill Prince George is facing life in jail.
Husnain Rashid, 32, also designed an online magazine which he planned to use to encourage terrorist attacks against the World Cup in Russia later this month.
The former web designer had denied the charges but yesterday changed his pleas to guilty two days into his trial. He was warned he faced a lengthy prison sentence over his ‘disturbing’ activities.
The son of a respected Muslim charity trustee in Nelson, Lancashire, Rashid claimed to have shelved plans to travel to Syria and wage jihad.
Instead, he stayed at home, living in a terraced house a few doors down from his elderly parents while teaching at a mosque and designing a website for a local tyre business.
But secretly he had not given up his terrorist ambitions and twisted ideology. He used online channels and chat groups to post an electronic ‘tool-kit’ for terrorism along with proposed targets. He hacked into neighbours’ internet signals in a bid to evade detection.
As well as targeting fans at the World Cup in Russia, Rashid suggested poisoning supermarket icecream stocks. Other targets included Wimbledon, the Trafford Centre in Manchester and BBC Proms in the Park.
After Prince George started school last September, Rashid posted a sinister image of the exterior of the building superimposed with images of masked jihadis. A threatening message read: ‘Even the Royal Family will not be left alone. School starts early.’ He then sent out the full address and postcode of the school.
Prosecutor Annabel Darlow QC said the ‘underlying message was clear’ – that Rashid was ‘providing the instruction, or threat, that Prince George and other members of the Royal Family should be viewed as potential targets’.
Sporting a large beard and wearing a grey prison sweatshirt, glasses and a black prayer cap, Rashid appeared at Woolwich Crown Court yesterday where he pleaded guilty to four counts of preparing or encouraging acts of terror. Remanding him in custody, Judge Lees told him: ‘I have heard the most disturbing allegations of your extensive terrorist activities.’
He adjourned sentence so that a probation report could be prepared. When police raided Rashid’s home in November 2017, he ran into the back yard and threw his mobile phone into an alley. He was asked to give the PIN for a phone found in the pocket of his jogging bottoms, but fainted into the arms of a police officer.
Rashid eventually ‘came round’ but claimed he had forgotten the number. The Samsung phone was recovered from the alleyway andspecialist officers, who also examined other devices, discovered a vast amount of terrorist material.
They included a magazine called Knights of Lone Jihad 3. This called for those living in ‘kuffar lands’ to kill in the name of Allah and suggested using a syringe filled with diluted cyanide to inject fruit and vegetables along with ice cream in supermarket freezers. Rashid, who wrote that he was still ‘desperate’ to travel to Syria to join Islamic State, also ran an online channel called the Lone Mujahid, which offered advice on attacks using poison, vehicles, weapons, bombs, chemicals and knives.
He also had plans for a terrorist magazine which would advise how to launch an attack against the World Cup in Russia this summer, his trial heard.
‘The underlying message intended by the defendant was clear; to encourage lone wolf jihadists operating on British soil to launch an attack on those watching events in stadiums and suggesting how to maximise the impact of the attack,’ Miss Darlow said.
Sue Hemming, head of the counter-terrorism division of the Crown Prosecution Service, said Rashid had no choice but to plead guilty because of the ‘overwhelming weight of evidence against him’.
‘Husnain Rashid is an extremist who not only sought to encourage others to commit attacks on targets in the West but was planning to travel aboard so he could fight himself,’ she said.
‘Disturbing allegations’