The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Terrorist group neo-Nazis guilty Midlands couple wanted all Jews dead
Afanatical neoNazi couple who named their baby son after Hitler have been convicted of membership of a terrorist group.
Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38, were yesterday found guilty of being members of the extreme right-wing organisation National Action, which was banned in 2016.
A jury at Birmingham Crown Court was told the couple had given their child the middle name Adolf, which Thomas said was in “admiration” of Hitler, and had Swastika scatter cushions in their home.
Photographs recovered from their home also showed Thomas cradling his new-born son while wearing the hooded white robes of a Ku Klux Klansman.
In conversation with another National Action member, Patatas said “all Jews must be put to death,” while Thomas had once told his partner he “found that all non-whites are intolerable”.
Former Amazon security guard Thomas and Patatas, a wedding photographer originally from Portugal who also wanted to “bring back concentration camps”, were found guilty after a seven-week trial.
A third defendant – a leading member in National Action’s Midlands chapter, Daniel Bogunovic, 27, of Crown Hills Rise, Leicester – was also convicted of membership.
Thomas, a twice-failed Army applicant, was also convicted on a majority verdict of having a terrorist manual, namely the Anarchist’s Cookbook, which jurors heard contained instructions on making “viable” bombs.
Three other men who had been due to stand trial alongside the trio – Darren Fletcher, 28, Joel Wilmore, 24, and Nathan Pryke, 26 – all admitted being National Action members before proceedings began.
All six were part of a Midlands cell of the terrorist group, which also counted a serving British soldier Mikko Vehvilainen, and a university student, Alexander Deakin, among its leading members.
Following the lifting of legal restrictions, details can only now be reported of how Vehvilainen, 34, and National Action’s Midlands organiser Deakin, 24, were both convicted of membership back in March. Both were later jailed for eight years.
Trial judge the Recorder of Birmingham Melbourne Inman QC told Bogunovic, Patatas and Thomas they and the three men who admitted membership prior to trial would be sentenced together in a twoday hearing beginning on Friday December 14, and concluding on the Monday.