Alfie Coleman was found guilty of preparing for terrorist acts and has been jailed for 13 and a half years
A young neo-Nazi has been handed a custodial sentence after plotting a mass shooting, having been caught in an MI5 undercover operation.
Alfie Coleman, 22, from Great Notley in Essex, was convicted of preparing for terrorist acts following a retrial at the Old Bailey. He has been jailed for 13 and a half years and will serve two-thirds of his sentence, less than the more than 1,000 days he has already spent in custody, before being eligible for parole.
The court heard how Coleman was just 14 years old when he first began scouring the internet for far-right extremist material, including a neo-Nazi text which he downloaded onto his iPad.
The former part-time Tesco employee went on to compile a hate list of colleagues and customers he labelled with racial slurs or as “race traitors”. He wrote a “manifesto” in a diary and pinpointed potential targets, among them the Lord Mayor of London and a mosque.
He was apprehended after undercover MI5 officers engaged with Coleman via encrypted messaging as he attempted to source weapons. Authorities first grew alarmed in the summer of 2023 when Coleman became increasingly active within online far-right extremist groups, reports the Mirror.
In early September 2023, he made arrangements to purchase a Skorpion automatic weapon, an AK47 rifle and ammunition in France, having identified a local mosque as his intended target – before swiftly abandoning the plan. Instead, MI5’s “highly sophisticated operation” reached its climax in a Morrisons car park in Stratford, east London, on the morning of 29 September 2023.
On that day, Coleman, who was 19 at the time, had arranged to purchase a Makarov pistol, five magazines and 200 rounds of ammunition from an undercover officer.
Jurors were shown dramatic footage of Coleman dropping £3,500 into a Land Rover Discovery and retrieving a holdall containing the handgun and ammunition from the boot. Before he had travelled 30 yards, Coleman, who was carrying his Tesco employee card, was confronted by armed counter-terrorism officers and forced to the ground.
A search of the home he shared with his parents and sibling laid bare the full extent of Coleman’s murderous ideology, including his idolisation of Thomas Mair, the extremist who murdered MP Jo Cox.
Officers discovered £2,500 in savings alongside a bug and hidden camera detector in his bedside drawer; a rock bearing a Swastika on a table; a Black Sun flag linked to neo-Nazism on the wall; and a selection of extreme right-wing literature.
Police additionally seized a collection of knives from his bedside drawer and atop his chest of drawers, along with a small stone axe, an air rifle and a leaflet relating to target shooting.
An examination of his electronic devices uncovered that in July 2021, Coleman had emailed the far-right white supremacist organisation Patriotic Alternative stating he “would like to start participating in activism”.
He proceeded to draft plans for potential terrorist attacks including hijacking an aircraft and targeting the Lord Mayor of London’s residence.
These schemes involved placing explosives in a cash machine alongside the deployment of knives and crossbows, the court heard.
He was “seething with hatred” while compiling a list of workplace colleagues who had “upset” him in September 2022, prosecutor Nicholas De La Poer KC stated. Amongst those he identified was a white female colleague married to a man of mixed Indian and Seychellois descent.
Coleman revealed he was “captivated” by an extreme right-wing publication which commemorated public hangings of “white race traitors”.
Six days prior to his arrest, Coleman shared an image of a balaclava-clad man carrying an automatic weapon, accompanied by the comment: “Coming soon here my man.”
Two days before his scheduled collection of the Makarov in Stratford, he posted: “Just something has gotta be done, how long can we sit here and talk over the internet.”
That same day, Coleman purchased a Gerber Strong Arm knife with a 4.8 inch blade through an online retailer.
During his testimony, Coleman described experiencing loneliness and struggling with his mental wellbeing throughout the Covid-19 lockdowns. He had acknowledged attempting to possess both a firearm and ammunition but refuted claims he was preparing for a terrorist attack.
He had entered guilty pleas to possessing 10 documents containing information likely to prove useful to terrorists including materials on weaponry and bomb-making guidance. Prosecutor Nicholas De La Poer KC informed the court that probation officers had concluded Coleman “posing a high risk of serious harm to the public”, and considered it improbable that “his feelings which were evidently quite deeply rooted would change completely”.
Speaking in mitigation, Martin Rutherford KC addressed the judge: “Alfie Coleman is not a young man without potential… Intelligent, articulate and polite, all of those things apply to him – but the reality is his obsessive personality took a horribly wrong turn back in 2020 and we are all dealing with the consequences of that now.”
Opting against a life sentence, Judge Marks said to the defendant: “Your age, immaturity, autistic spectrum disorder traits, anxiety, vulnerability, lack of previous convictions and the absence of actual physical harm caused by you all in my judgment weigh heavily against a discretionary life sentence.”
Cdr Helen Flanagan, head of counter-terrorism policing in London, commented: “He lived in a normal family [and had a] normal education. He was like any other child, any other teenager, who was spending a lot of time online behind closed doors.”
She added: “Sadly, living in that world, he was able to radicalise himself and be overexposed to a significant amount of influence in the extreme right wing.”
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