Teenage terror mastermind fights for anonymity

BRITAIN’S youngest convicted terrorist who was just 14 when he masterminded a plot to behead police officers has gone to court to try to keep his identity secret for life.

The teenager had faced being named when he turned 18, having been sentenced to life imprisonment for inciting terrorism.

The boy, from Blackburn, had masqueraded as a seasoned jihadist to encourage an Australian teenager to execute at least one police officer on Anzac Day. The youth had exchanged more than 3,000 encrypted messages with Sevdet Besim, an 18-year-old from Melbourne.

The British boy’s identity was protected until his 18th birthday. He was 15 when he was jailed in October 2015 and ordered to serve a minimum five years, making him eligible for release in 2020 at the earliest.

But the teenager – who can be identified only as RXG – was granted an interim order preventing him being named when he turned 18. A full hearing scheduled at the High Court for October will decide if he keeps his anonymity for life.

Such lifelong anonymity orders are rare and have been granted previously to Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the murderers of the Liverpool toddler Jamie Bulger; to Mary Bell, who strangled two toddlers in 1968; and to Maxine Carr, who was given a secret identity after being convicted of lying to police investigating the Soham murders.

The bespectacled teenage terrorist, who pleaded guilty to inciting terrorism overseas, was described as a “deeply committed radical extremist” by the sentencing judge, Mr Justice Saunders, at Manchester Crown Court.

The judge put in place an anonymity order fearing that the boy could become a role model for other young jihadists, sympathetic to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

When he was only 13, RXG had already begun telling fellow pupils that Osama bin Laden was his hero and that he wanted to die fighting as a martyr.

By 2014, he had told one of his teachers that he wanted to “cut his throat and watch him bleed to death”.

The teenager was arrested for making threats to teachers by counter-terrorism police officers who uncovered the messages to Besim in Australia.

Besim had no idea that he had been communicating with a 14-year-old boy and had thought his mentor was a married man with children.