ARMY CORPORAL WAS NAZI WHO TRIED TO RECRUIT SOLDIERS FOR RACE WAR
Police warn over rise of far Right as fascist is jailed for hoarding weapons and setting up ‘whites-only’ stronghold
A SERVING soldier was at the heart of a far-Right cell whose members posed with swastikas, Ku Klux Klan robes and hoarded weaponry, it emerged yesterday.
Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen was connected to at least three other soldiers in a plan to recruit other troops to the banned neo-Nazi group National Action for a coming ‘race war’.
The father-of-three served with the Royal Anglian Regiment and lived at Sennybridge Camp in Powys, Wales.
But at the same time he was renovating a home he had bought in the village of Llansilin, Powys, as part of an effort to establish a whites-only stronghold. Here, police found a photo showing him giving a Nazi-style salute at a memorial to his native Finland’s independence.
Vehvilainen, 34, was found guilty earlier this year of belonging to National Action and was jailed for eight years.
But details of his conviction and that of fellow member Alex Deakin, 24, could not be reported until a linked trial involving three fellow members of the Midlands ‘chapter’ of the banned group ended yes- terday. Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38, from Banbury, Oxfordshire, were convicted of National Action membership alongside Daniel Bogunovic, 27, a man of Serbian descent who lives with his parents in Leicester. They will be sentenced next month.
Police yesterday warned the far Right poses an increasing threat and has become adept at using slick social media postings and sick tactics to push the idea of a ‘race war’ and violent extremism. Vehvilainen, an Afghanistan war veteran, was born to a British mother, Lorraine, 56, an anaesthetist, and a Finnish father who was a former mayor and UN peacekeeper.
He was considered an exemplary soldier by his superiors, but harboured a hatred of Jews and black people, and kept a swastika in a cupboard at the barracks accommodation where he lived with his family.
A licensed firearms holder, Vehvilainen moved from Finland to the UK with his mother and sibling at the age of four when his parents’ marriage broke down.
His mother, formerly from Lincolnshire but now living abroad, said in court that as a teenager her ‘mischievous’ son was ‘a little bit challenging’.
Asked when he might have developed his ‘deeply offensive and racist views’, she said: ‘I really don’t know. I was in complete shock and disbelief [when he was arrested in September 2017].’
His father Erkki told the Daily Mail that when his son returned to Finland to work in his company he ‘appeared to be extremely interested in religion and kickboxing’. Vehvilainen married a Bolivian woman and moved to Bolivia with her and their daughter for three years, but returned but when the relationship faltered.
He settled in the Finnish city of Turku, where he met the Russian woman who was to become his second wife, and joined the far Right Finnish Resistance Movement.
Vehvilainen was arrested after threatening a neighbour with an air pistol in a dispute over loud music, although it is unclear whether he was ever convicted. He returned to the UK with his wife and their two children in 2013, when his application to join the British Army was successful.
Vehvilainen went on trial at Birmingham Crown Court with fellow Royal Anglian Regiment soldier Private Mark Barrett, who was also accused of membership of National Action.
Barrett was acquitted, but jurors heard he had a cardboard swastika openly displayed on his windowsill at Alexander Barracks in Cyprus.
It is understood that Vehvilainen and Barrett have since been thrown out of the Army. Vehvilainen also approached two other soldiers, who were internally disciplined and remained in the Army.
Vehvilainen also pleaded guilty to having a canister of CS gas but was acquitted of two counts of stirring up racial hatred relating to forum posts on a white nationalist website. National Action was outlawed in December 2016, months after endorsing the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, who campaigned on behalf of refugees.
But the court heard those on trial had simply ‘shed one skin for another’ by ‘rebranding’ under different banners such as the Triple K Mafia in order to evade the law.
Detective Chief Superintend-
‘Deeply offensive and racist views’ ‘The danger they pose is very high’
ent Matt Ward, who led the investigation for the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit, said National Action ‘has an ideology of violent intent’, adding: ‘They are good at recruiting and radicalising people and when you put all that together then the danger they pose is very high.’
Asked about the photos shown to the jury in the latest trial of Thomas dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and Nazi memorabilia littering his living room, Mr Ward said: ‘As a father, I thought the photos were shocking. It is appalling for any family to see.’
Colonel Graham Taylor, of the Army Personnel Services Group, said far Right ideology was ‘completely at odds’ with the values and standards of the military.