Yard Right-wing warning
SCOTLAND Yard has warned about the proliferation of extreme Right-wing material online, after it emerged the terrorist who carried out the Finsbury Park attack was “brainwashed” against Muslims in just three weeks.
Darren Osborne will be sentenced to life in prison today after he was found guilty of murdering Makram Ali, 51, and attempting to murder nine others, when he deliberately drove a hire van into a group of worshippers outside a mosque last June. During his trial it was revealed that Osborne, 48, a lonewolf attacker, had become a “ticking time bomb” after watching Three Girls, a BBC drama based on events in Rochdale, where young girls were abused by a group of predominantly British-pakistani men. Within three weeks, he had been “radicalised” by material available online, including Facebook posts and tweets connected to Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League, and Jayda Fransen, a co-founder of the Britain First group.
ON THE evening of May 16 last year, Darren Osborne, an unemployed father-of-four from Cardiff, sat down on his sofa to watch a BBC drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal.
Such was his outrage at the events depicted in Three Girls, that he turned to the internet for more information.
Within three weeks, the extreme Right-wing material he found online had radicalised him to such an extent that he deliberately drove a hire van into a group of Muslims, killing one and injuring 12 others.
The speed at which he became brainwashed by inflammatory material he found on social media sites has left counter-terrorism experts deeply concerned and has led to calls for technology giants to do more to remove it.
Before last summer, Osborne had never been known to express extreme views on religion or race.
A barmaid in his former local pub said: “He was a notorious bad boy, involved in drugs and fighting. People were scared of him. But I don’t remember any racism.”
Ellis Osborne, 26, his nephew, who is mixed race, also said he had never heard his uncle express extreme views.
But all that changed in early June last year when he began looking at social media and other websites linked to Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League, and Jayda Fransen and Paul Golding, the cofounders of Britain First.
When police examined his digital devices in the wake of the attack, they found he had spent hours searching for extremist material, which fuelled his growing hatred for Muslims.
In the weeks before the attack, he followed Mr Robinson and Ms Fransen on Twitter and Facebook and received direct messages from their accounts.
Commander Dean Haydon, the head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism unit, said while the BBC drama had proved to be the catalyst, Osborne’s rapid radicalisation had clearly been the result of the inflammatory material he had seen online.
Mr Haydon said: “This case demonstrates to me that individuals can be radicalised very quickly, within three or four weeks. We have to look at the role of the internet and radicalisation. It does demonstrate the speed of radicalisation … it’s a concern for us.
“Those around him described how he became obsessed with material that he started looking at online. He was researching high-profile individuals, such as Mr Robinson and Ms Fransen, as well as extreme Right-wing groups that were not proscribed.
“It was clear that, in the space of only a few weeks, he had developed a warped and twisted view, to such a degree that he was prepared to plan and carry out an attack,” Mr Haydon said.
“I’m not going to call Tommy Robinson a radicaliser, but there is material out there linked to some of the groups connected to him that quite clearly has been an influence in this case.”
He said while much of the “unpalatable” extreme Right-wing material available online was not illegal, social media companies could do more to proactively remove it. Osborne’s attack
‘He became obsessed with material that he started looking at online’
killed Makram Ali, a 51-year-old fatherof-six, and left 12 other people injured.
After his arrest, police found a hatefilled note in the hire van he used, in which he spouted extremist views, quoting from a message Mr Robinson had posted online.
During his trial, he denied carrying out the attack, claiming the driver had actually been an associate called Dave, who mysteriously vanished after the incident.
Osborne will be sentenced today at Woolwich Crown Court.