Teen Jailed For Lee Rigby Copycat Attack Plot

A teenage terrorist has been jailed for trying to persuade a man with learning difficulties to carry out a Woolwich-style attack.

Kazi Islam, 19, was given an eight-year prison sentence for grooming 19-year-old Harry Thomas in a bid to get him to murder soldiers in the way that Lee Rigby had been killed.

Islam attempted to make Mr Thomas buy the ingredients for a pipe bomb and attack one or more soldiers with a kitchen knife or meat cleaver on his command.

He encouraged Mr Thomas, who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, to start calling himself Haroon, instead of Harry.

He tried to radicalise him with stories of innocent children being murdered by military forces.

But his plot was foiled when Mr Thomas failed to buy the bomb ingredients and accidentally told some friends what Islam had asked him to do.

Judge Richard Marks QC told Islam that his behaviour towards Mr Thomas was an aggravating feature.

He said: "Even on your own account, that you knew he was an extremely vulnerable young man, your treatment of him was as callous as it was manipulative."

The judge said that since his conviction the defendant had shown neither remorse nor insight into the seriousness of what he had done.

Islam, who will serve his sentence in a young offenders institute, had denied wrongdoing, claiming he only talked about getting the components for a bomb as an "experiment" in radicalisation.

But an jury at the Old Bailey found, Islam, of Meanley Road, Newham, east London, guilty of engaging in the preparation of terrorist acts.

The practising Muslim said he first became interested in issues surrounding Afghanistan and Iraq because he wanted to find out why Fusilier Rigby had been attacked outside his Woolwich barracks in May 2013.

For "research purposes" he attended meetings and talks held by the banned extremist group al Muhajiroun, viewed jihadist propaganda online and even downloaded a document entitled How To Make Semtex, he said.

He said he met Mr Thomas on an IT course at Barking and Dagenham College and decided to befriend him in October 2013.

His experiment with Mr Thomas was inspired by Nicky Reilly - another Asperger's syndrome sufferer like Mr Thomas - who had been involved in a failed suicide bombing in Exeter, Islam said.