Terrorist, 15, plotted Aussie beheading

BRITAIN’S youngest terrorist plotted a Lee Rigby-style outrage on the other side of the world, after being enrolled on a government counter-radicalisation programme.

The schoolboy was placed on the Channel Project at the age of 13, after concerns were raised by his school.

But a year later, from his bedroom in Blackburn, he began directing plans for an 18-year-old Australian to kill and behead police officers at an Anzac Day parade, Australia’s equivalent of Remembrance Sunday, in Melbourne.

Yesterday, the boy, now aged 15, became the country’s youngest convicted terrorist after admitting inciting terrorism overseas.

The bespectacled teenager, who appeared at the Old Bailey via a video link from Manchester Crown Court, will be sentenced in September.

But the case has again raised questions over the success of government anti-radicalisation efforts at a time when numbers of young Muslims are being attracted by the lure of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis).

The boy may also have been in the early stages of planning a bomb attack in Britain, it can be disclosed.

Intercepted communications showed he had an ‘‘interest in explosives’’, and boasted of looking forward to planning his own ‘‘op’’.

The court heard that he exchanged thousands of encrypted messages with Sevdet Besim, an Australian, instructing him to drive a car into a crowd at the annual Anzac Day commemorations, and then behead a police officer.

But the plan was interrupted days before it had been due to take place and Besim is awaiting trial in Australia.

Paul Greaney, QC, prosecuting, told the court that in one message the boy warned the Australian, whom he described as a ‘‘lone wolf’’, not to underestimate the difficulty of beheading someone, telling him: ‘‘U gotta be a lion especially that ur doin it in public.’’

The teenager, in spectacles, a grey shirt and striped tie, was accompanied by his father in court and listened intently to proceedings.

At the family’s smart semidetached home, the boy’s mother said he had been brainwashed.

At 15 the boy is Britain’s youngest terrorist. He had been flagged as a risk and referred to the Channel Project in November 2013.

In March this year he was arrested by Lancashire Police for an unrelated matter, but when officers examined his mobile phone they discovered a large amount of extremist material.

He is the second person this year to be convicted of terror offences despite being on an antiextremism project.

In February, Brusthom Ziamani, 19, was found guilty of plotting to behead a British soldier in an echo of the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby. He had been placed on the Government’s Prevent programme but had rejected attempts to confront his Islamist views.