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Teenage Satanist neo-Nazi spared jail after admitting terror offences
Hope Not Hate welcomed Old Bailey ruling, saying it demonstrated how young people were being groomed by far-right groups
November 4, 2020 09:51
Hope Not Hate welcomed Old Bailey ruling, saying it demonstrated how young people were being groomed by far-right groups
November 4, 2020 09:51A teenage Satanist neo-Nazi has avoided time in jail after he admitted 14 terror offences.
Harry Vaughan was radicalised by right-wing extremist ideology online from the age of 14. Google searches revealed he had looked for explosives and schools near where he lived.
The 18-year-old was sentenced to two years’ detention suspended for two years. He was also handed a 60-day rehabilitation order and a terrorist notification order for 10 years.
Hope Not Hate said that the case was an example of “the increasing danger posed to young people by the extreme far-right generally and the neo-Nazi Satanist movement known as the Order of Nine Angles in particular.”
Mr Vaughan also pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing indecent videos featuring young boys.
In sentencing, Mr Justice Sweeney took account of the defendant’s young age and his diagnosis with high-functioning autism. While the defendant owned documents on explosives, the judge said there was no suggestion he was preparing to manufacture them himself, reported the Shropshire Star.
Mr Vaughan’s arrest last June had left his parents with a “sense of bewilderment”, according to Naeem Mian QC, mitigating.
The A-star student at Tiffin Grammar in Kingston-upon-Thames had been caught as part of the counter-terror operation Fascist Forge, after describing himself online as identifying with the “cult of the Supreme Being”.
Police found 4,200 images and 302 files – including terrorist handbooks and documents relating to Satanism, neo-Nazism and antisemitism – on Mr Vaughan’s personal devices.
Some encouraged acts of terror in the name of the Sonnenkrieg Division, one of a handful of right-wing extremist groups to be deemed a terrorist organisation by the government.
In a March 2018 application to join the System Resistance Network, an alias of another banned neo-Nazi group National Action, he wrote: “There is nothing I wouldn’t do to further the cause.”
Prosecutor Dan Pawson-Pounds said at an earlier hearing the material “demonstrated unequivocally that Vaughan had an entrenched extreme right-wing and racist mindset, as well as an interest in explosives, firearms and violence more generally.”
Mr Niam said the case was “perhaps an ideal illustration of the dangers each and every parent has to deal with, potentially.
“We cannot be sure where they are going, what they are doing, in their bedrooms.”
At Westminster Youth Court, in September, Vaughan pleaded guilty to one count of encouragement of terrorism, one count of disseminating a terrorist publication, 12 counts of possessing a document containing information of a kind likely to be of use to a person preparing or committing an act of terrorism, and two counts of making an indecent photograph of a child.
Jenny Hopkins, head of the special crime and counter terrorism division of the CPS, said: “This case reinforces once again there isn’t just one type of person who engages in terrorism in the UK, and shows the hard work of the criminal justice system in holding these people to account.”
In a statement, a spokesman for Hope Not Hate said the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a Satanist movement, “explicitly encourages adherents to commit murder, extreme violence and sexual abuse.”
He continued: “This is so they can be steeled to commit crimes against real victims, increasing in severity till they commit the most serious crimes possible – murder and rape – with the ultimate aim of destabilising society and provoking a ‘race war’.
“We have been calling on the government to ban O9A for over a year, and it is clear this action is long overdue.”
