TWO 15-year-old schoolboys were caught plotting to blow up the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace after one of their mothers discovered suspicious powder in her son’s room.
She called police, who unearthed a plot to carry out atrocities around the UK ending in a double suicide bombing.
After the boy’s arrest, police found a message on his phone that he had sent to his friend, saying: “Fam found something, deciding if to report me, I could get life or worse if they check everything else.”
The youths had been buying chemicals, pipes and fuses online to make viable devices based on a recipe found on the internet, Newcastle Crown Court heard.
In online conversations, they discussed going on a drug-fuelled rampage, killing families in their homes, making a beheading video and ending their days as wanted men. They made reference to Lee Rigby, the soldier murdered by two Islamist fanatics and Raoul Moat, who shot himself in 2010 after going on a gun rampage in Northumberland.
A mobile phone seized from one of the boys was found to contain messages relating to making explosives, particular chemicals and the Taliban. One of the youths, who cannot be named for legal reasons, also named Eldon Square shopping centre in Newcastle as “somewhere he could go out with a bang”.
Although the materials seized had not been made into bombs, Army experts said they could have been used for viable improvised explosive devices.
Nick Dry, prosecuting, said one of the defendants had been confronted by his parents last year. “They had noticed a change in him over the past year or so when he had started to show them pho- tographs of drugs, money and weapons, tell sick jokes about 9/11 and, latterly, tell them that he was making a bomb.
“In fact, Skype communications between the defendants in October and November last year confirm they were doing just that. Potential targets discussed included a local public school, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and a random shopping centre.”
A box of fuses was delivered to the home of one of the boys, who also bought and cut down lengths of pipe which he told his parents were for a school project. Three other packages sent to the home were found to contain potential bombmaking ingredients after being opened by the boy’s parents.
In December last year, the boy’s mother searched his room and found powders which turned out to be paracetamol, caffeine and sucrose, substances commonly used to dilute drugs.
She called the police, who seized the powders and arrested the boy. The other boy was also arrested and found to have six metal pipes in the garage, another in the kitchen and a bag of fuses.
Sentencing the pair, Judge John Milford QC said: “In the event, because of the intervention of your parents and police, no explosives were created and no bombs were made. But the potential of such items in the hands of disturbed teenagers, which you both undoubtedly were at this time, is frightening.”
Geoff Knowles, defending the boy whose parents found the materials, said his client suffered from a mental health condition and was a “lonely young man who was clearly isolated from his peers”.
The two boys, now 16, both from Tyneside, were sent to youth custody for 12 months after admitting conspiracy to make an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose.