LONDON, April 30 (Reuters) – A British white supremacist who prosecutors said idolised Adolf Hitler was on Thursday convicted of preparing terrorism acts after trying to buy a gun and ammunition from undercover officers.
Alfie Coleman paid 3,500 pounds ($4,730) for a pistol and around 200 rounds of ammunition before being arrested by police in September 2023.
The 21-year-old venerated Nazi dictator Hitler and Thomas Mair, a loner obsessed with the Nazis who murdered lawmaker Jo Cox in a frenzied street attack in 2016, prosecutors said.
Manifestos written by Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black people at a South Carolina church in 2015, and Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 Muslim worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, were found on Coleman’s devices when he was arrested.
Prosecutor Nicholas de la Poer told jurors at London’s Old Bailey court that Coleman had written his own manifesto as a diary, in which he stated: “All people whom are not on our side must die.”
Coleman pleaded guilty to possessing the gun and 10 charges relating to documents containing information likely to be useful to terrorists, but denied the preparation of terrorist acts.
He was convicted by a jury after a retrial and will be sentenced in July.
Police previously said Coleman had extensively consumed extreme right-wing material online as a teenager, particularly during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when he was 15.
Bethan David, head of counter terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service, described Coleman as “a dangerous man who planned to commit a terrorist attack to further his extreme racist and white supremacist agenda”.
“He was motivated by an extreme ideology and hatred of people of other races and religions, he was clearly intent on acting on these ideas and causing harm,” David added.
($1 = 0.7400 pounds)
(Reporting by Sam TobinEditing by Ros Russell)
