Yahoo News Rioting ex-soldier tried to blow up Hanley mosque
A rioting ex-squaddie who threw missiles at police as Hanley descended into anarchy had previously tried to blow up a mosque. Simon Beech faces jail for his role in the post-Southport city centre chaos in the summer.
And it has now emerged that the former soldier previously served a 10-year prison sentence for setting fire to Hanley's City Central Mosque in 2011 when he was aged just 23. Beech, who was serving with the 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment at the time, hatched his blast plot after being angered by extremist Muslims burning poppies.
In one Facebook comment posted on Armistice Day, Beech, who was a member of the British National Party and the English Defence League at the time, wrote: “The time has come. We burn their place, burn the lot of them.”
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Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court heard at the time that Beech and his friend Garreth Foster carried out their attack in the early hours of December 3 2010 when they connected a pipe to a live gas main and fed it 163ft into the first floor of the Regent Road mosque. They then lit a fire on the ground floor. But firefighters put out the fire before it took hold.
Beech - who quit the Army following his arrest - and Foster were found guilty of arson by a jury. Now 13 years after that conviction, Beech is set to be locked up again.
The court heard Beech repeatedly ignored police in Hanley on August 3 when he was asked to move back. He threw a missile at police and repeatedly challenged public order officers.
The defendant, now aged 36, of Chell Heath, will be sentenced at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court on November 25 after pleading guilty to violent disorder.
A Staffordshire Police spokesman said: "We’re continuing to trawl through the evidence we have in-order to take action against those responsible for the violent disorder in Stoke-on-Trent on 3 August and Tamworth on 4 August."
