A teenage Islamic State fanatic has been jailed for life for plotting a terror attack on British police officers or soldiers after being radicalised online in the pandemic.

Muslim convert Matthew King, 19, expressed a desire to kill military personnel as he prepared to stake out a British Army barracks in Stratford, east London.

He discussed his plans and shared a “gory fantasy” with an online girlfriend with whom he struck up an adolescent flirtation, the Old Bailey heard.

His desires to launch an attack in Britain or travel to Syria to join so-called Islamic State were thwarted when his mother reported him to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme.

Authorities were also tipped off through an anti-terrorist hotline after he posted a video on a WhatsApp group on April 13 last year.

While in custody, King had made a violent threats to “behead an imam” and “kill and chop up staff”, the Old Bailey was told.

In January, King, from Wickford in Essex, pleaded guilty to preparation of terrorist acts between December 22 2021 and May 17 2022.

On Friday, he was handed a discretionary life sentence with a minimum term of six years in the first terrorism sentencing in England and Wales to be televised.

Judge Mark Lucraft KC praised King’s mother, saying: “She took the very bold step of alerting Prevent when she had concerns for her son. That cannot have been an easy thing to do in the first place and in my view she absolutely the right thing.”

Judge Lucraft found King was a dangerous offender and carried a risk of future harm to the public, despite claims by his barrister the defendant was on the path to deradicalisation.

In mitigation, Hossein Zahir KC said King was “immature” and the prospect he would carrying out either of his terrorist plans were “remote”.

The defence barrister argued that despite incidents of “offensive and abusive” behaviour in custody, King was “slowly and steadily” disengaging from the excesses of extremism.

After the sentencing, Scotland Yard described King as a “committed, self-initiated terrorist” who was “self-radicalised” online during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Commander Dominic Murphy, who leads the Met’s counter terrorism command, said: “We had seen an escalation in Matthew King’s behaviour, in his reconnaissance, in his online activity.

“I genuinely believe this was an imminent terrorist attack. Without the public’s help and without the efficient investigation of my officers, officers from the eastern region and members of the intelligence community, we wouldn’t have been able to disrupt what, for me, was an imminent attack.”

Setting out the facts at a previous hearing, prosecutor Paul Jarvis had described how King had developed an “entrenched Islamist extremist mindset”.

In his early teens, King “dabbled with drugs” and was expelled from school after becoming aggressive, eventually leaving education entirely at the age of 16.

Around 2020, he became interested in Islam, began to attend mosques and watched Muslim videos on YouTube.

By May 2021, his family noticed he had become more extreme and his mother became concerned he was watching material online promoting hatred, Mr Jarvis said.

He had developed a friendship with a girl – identified in court only as Miss A – who he met online.

He spoke of wanting to get his hands on an American or British Marine and told the girl: “I just wanna die a martyr.”

When Miss A appeared to support and encourage him, King responded: “I guess jihadi love is powerful. I just want to kill people.”

In further graphic chat, Miss A talked about torturing, mutilating and beheading a soldier and then cutting up the body parts.

As part of his terror attack planning, King had set up an online account with the retailer Knife Warehouse, searched for IS tactical training videos in the use of knives and bought “tactical gloves” and goggles.

On one occasion, he went into his sister’s bedroom dressed up in his combat outfit and asked if she liked his clothes.

King made videos as he checked out potential targets including Stratford army barracks, police officers outside Stratford Magistrates’ Court and at the railway station.

Some of his hostile reconnaissance videos were overlaid with nasheeds – Islamic chants – and he posted on Snapchat: “Target acquired”.

Meanwhile, King had searched the internet for terrorist killers including the Manchester Arena bomber and Jihadi John.

While planning acts of terrorism in Britain, King had also expressed a desire to join Islamic State in Syria and sought advice on a WhatsApp group about the best way to get there.

Authorities were alerted after King posted on WhatsApp an image of a male holding a knife with the words: “Those who said that there is no jihad and no battle. They are lying!”

King was arrested at his home on May 18 last year by officers from the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command.

He described his former Islamic name as “Abdul Kalashnikov” and told police: “The only thing which is black and white is the sharia, the law of Allah.”

King’s barrister told the court that more recent conversations with his supportive family showed signs the defendant was turning away from his radical beliefs.

And in a prison phone call, King told his mother: “I’m not extreme anymore.”

A father whose two sons died fighting in Syria has been found guilty of encouraging violent jihad in a speech at his local mosque.

Abubaker Deghayes, 53, promoted “jihad by sword” when he addressed worshippers at the Brighton Mosque and Muslim Community Centre.

The defendant, who originally comes from Libya, had denied intending to encourage terrorism in his speech to around 50 people, including children and young adults.

On Wednesday, a jury at the Old Bailey found him guilty of the charge.

It can now be reported that two of Deghayes’ sons were killed fighting for Islamists in Syria and he lost a third in a stabbing in the East Sussex city.

Abdul – who had become embroiled with drugs and was murdered by a dealer in 2019 aged 22 – was the twin brother of Abdullah, who was killed fighting in Syria in 2016 aged 18.

Their brother Jaffar, 17, was killed in 2014 while trying to overthrow Bashar Al-Assad’s government.

Amer, another son and former finance student, who also travelled to Syria, is understood to be continuing to fight for the cause.

During his Old Bailey trial, jurors were played a video of Deghayes’ speech at the mosque on Sunday November 1 2020.

In it, he was seen to make a stabbing gesture when talking about jihad.

He told worshippers: “Whose power is more powerful than us? Allah is more powerful than you. You, idiots. You kuffar (non-believers)… The non-believer is an idiot. He’s stupid.”

He went on: “Jihad, jihad, jihad. Jihad is compulsory. Jihad is fighting by sword. That means this jihad is compulsory upon you, not jihad is the word of mouth but jihad will remain compulsory until the Day of Resurrection…”

Prosecutor Ben Lloyd told jurors that the speech was not given “innocently or naively”.

He said: “The prosecution case is clear. By the defendant’s words and gestures he was encouraging people to undertake violent jihad.

“The defendant’s speech demonstrates him to be an Islamic extremist. He is someone who believes in the use of violence in the cause of Islam.

“Or, at the very least, he was reckless in giving his speech as to whether people would be encouraged.”

The defendant, of Saltdean in East Sussex, denied wrongdoing, saying he was explaining the meaning of Jihad by the sword as self-defence.

The gesture he made was a “dance of the blade”, he claimed.

He also referred to Prime Minister Boris Johnson as wearing a face covering now after describing Muslim women as “letter boxes”.

The jury was told nothing about the Deghayes family background.

In 2017, a serious case review identified missed opportunities to prevent Deghayes’ sons from being radicalised before they were killed in Syria.

There was also little understanding of the part religion played in the lives of Abdullah and Jaffar, who were believed to have been with the al Qaida-affiliated Al-Nusra Front when they died, the review added.

The report also contained allegations that their father would wake his children up at 4.30am to study the Koran and would whip them with electrical wire or hand out other punishments if he felt they were not doing this properly.

After the review, their uncle Omar Deghayes – who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and spent five years in Guantanamo Bay – hit out at police, claiming they took “no action whatsoever” while his radicalised young nephews were being racially abused.

Following Deghayes’ conviction, he was granted continued bail ahead of sentencing at the Old Bailey on February 25.

Turbulence in China’s restive far western region of Xinjiang has been caused by “external factors”, a state-run newspaper said Saturday in an editorial responding to calls by a group of U.S. lawmakers for sanctions on Chinese officials.

“Western accusations of Xinjiang governance seriously misled the extremists, making them believe they were launching religious Jihad and won sympathy and support from Western and international society,” said the editorial in the Global Times, a tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party’s People’s Daily.

“Some forces have slandered China’s governing efforts” in Xinjiang, the editorial said, accusing a “West-centred (value) system” of making “empty statements about human rights regardless of the purpose and effect of Xinjiang governance and the grim reality it targets.”

“Such empty talk inspires extremists, which meets the purposes of some Western politicians trying to undermine the governance achievements in Xinjiang and push the region into turmoil,” the editorial said.

Whether Xinjiang governance abuses human rights must be judged by whether its results safeguard the interests of the majority in the region, it continued.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers called for sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for human rights abuses against minority Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, saying it was being turned into a “high-tech police state”.

On Thursday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular press briefing in Beijing that the United States did “not have the right” to make “unwarranted criticism” of China’s policies toward ethnic minorities.

A United Nations human rights panel this month said it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uighurs in China were held in what resembled a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

China has said that Xinjiang faces a serious threat from Islamist militants and separatists who plot attacks and stir up tensions between the mostly Muslim Uighur minority who call the region home and the ethnic Han Chinese majority.

Hundreds have died in unrest there in recent years.

We know that specific institutions have on many occasions been the generator for producing radicalised individuals who go onto commit terrorists attacks. Another such institution based in Indonesia which has generated militants from Indonesia to Syria, has been the Ibnu Mas’ud boarding school where Muslim students are provided with boarding facilities, food and religious education. 

Ibnu Mas‘ud is one of about 30,000 Islamic boarding schools, or ‘pesantren’, across Indonesia. Many of these ‘pesantren’ provide much needed care and basic items for young people though Indonesian officials admit that a handful have generated young people who have actively been involved in terrorism and in the promulgation of extremism.

The chart below shows the radical alumni that have graduated from Ibnu Mas’ud. These radical alumni took two routes, one to set up local bases in Indonesia, with a second batch moving onto fighting with Daesh or the Islamic State. 

The radical alumni include individuals present in the Aceh training camp for Indonesian militants which was commanded by an individual called Dulmatin. Implicated in the Bali bombings that killed 202 people, Dulmatin had a bounty of $10 million on his head. Fearing an attack from militants in the Aceh camp against Government buildings and assets, a Government raid was conducted in 2010, leading to the capture of a number of militants who had studied at Ibnu Mas’ud. These included:

• Hari Budiman: Jailed for 5 years for financing the Aceh camp,
• Kamaludin: Jailed for 6 years for bank robberies to fund the militant training camp
• Sofya Tsauri: Jailed for supplying weapons to militants
• Enceng Kurnia: a logistics expert and a militant Islamist
• Agus Kasdianto: Involved in the failed Jakarta bomb plot and for sustaining the terrorist camp.

Graduates of Ibnu Mas’ud who went onto fight for the Islamic State included:

• Hatf Saiful Rasul: A 12 year old who fought and died in Syria for IS
• Umar Jundal Haq: The son of a Bali bomber, who joined IS and who died in Syria
• Didi Resdianto: Who travelled to Syria with his family and whose wife became a cheerleader for the Islamic State online

The Indonesian Government increasingly realises the internal threat to its own population and to the stability of the country by radical and extremist preachers and institutions. The fact that Indonesia remains a possible staging post for such militants to export young men for a global Jihad, will no doubt remain on the minds of Indonesian officials. 

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for an attack on a traffic police post outside Moscow on Wednesday in which both attackers were killed, calling it revenge for Russia’s aerial bombing campaign in Syria.

The militant group made the claim via the Amaq news agency, which it regularly uses to issue statements, and released a video in which the purported attackers said they wanted to take revenge for Russia killing Muslims in the Middle East.

Russia has been bombing militants in Syria since September last year, part of a military campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad.

Islamic State called on its members to carry out jihad or holy war in Russia in a YouTube video last month, after which the Kremlin said such threats would not affect its fight against international terrorism.

“We have taken the path of jihad on the orders of our Amir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” one of the purported attackers said on the video released by Amaq, speaking in a mix of Arabic and Russian.

The video named the attackers as Uthman Mardalov and Salim Israilov.

“We have called this operation ‘revenge operation’. Revenge for you bombing our brothers, because you kill our brothers every day in Syria and Iraq. … This will be the start of everything that will come to you.”

Russian investigators said on Wednesday that two unidentified people armed with a firearm and two axes had attacked a traffic police post outside Moscow.

One of them was shot dead while attacking the post, while the other was killed when he tried to put up armed resistance, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Two police officers were wounded in the attack, one seriously.