Student encouraged terrorism, court told

THE Duke of Sussex was branded a ‘race traitor’ and pictured with a gun to his head in an image posted online by a Portsmouth student.

The image of Harry, against a blood-spattered background and featuring a swastika, was shared on a far-right social media platform last year.

University student Michal Szewczuk, 19, was arrested in Portsmouth but is from Wyther Park in Bramley, Leeds. He is being sentenced for two counts of encouraging terrrorism and five counts of possession of terrorist material.

He searched ‘Meghan Markle’, ‘Prince Harry’ and ‘pointing gun’ before creating the image and sharing it in August.

It included the phrase ‘See Ya Later Race Traitor’.

Judge Rebecca Poulet QC said the image ‘advances violence’.

She said: ‘It is not just something that is deeply unpalatable. It encourages terrorism.’

Szewczuk sipped water and gave no reaction in the dock at the Old Bailey, while quotes from his blog justifying the rape of women and children to further an Aryan race were read aloud to the court.

He is being sentenced alongside Oskar DunnKoczorowski, 18, for encouraging terrorism by posting images or links to Gab, a social media platform which attracts mainly far-right users, last summer.

Prosecutor Naomi Parsons said the posts, made across three accounts by the two teenagers ‘convey a message of the threat of and/or use of serious violence against others, in order to advance a political, ideological and racial cause (neo-Nazism) and in this way encourage terrorism’.

She told the court targets included Jewish people, nonwhite people and anyone ‘perceived to be complicit in the perpetuation of multiculturalism'.

In mitigation for Szewczuk, his lawyer Adam Morgan said his client had a ‘difficult and disordered upbringing’ and had suffered with depression ‘for a considerable period’.

The court heard he moved to the UK from Poland aged 10, living first in Northern Ireland and then England.

The teenagers were remanded in custody as Judge Poulet adjourned sentencing until today.

Szewczuk, who was arrested in December at his halls of residence during his first year studying computer science at Portsmouth University, pleaded guilty in April to possession of documents including the White Resistance Manual and the al Qaida Manual.