The schoolgirl, who can not be named for legal reasons, told how she she “deeply regrets” her actions as she was sentenced at Manchester Youth Court.
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The girl was first detained by anti-terror police in April along with Britain’s youngest convicted Islamic terrorist, a boy of 14 from Blackburn, Lancashire, who admitted encouraging an IS-inspired beheading attack on officers at the annual Anzac parade in Melbourne. On those grounds he concluded “the risk of serious harm was low” from the girl’s offending.
He said it was clear that she has “spent a considerable time thinking long and hard about her behaviour” and that her mother had been horrified to learn what her daughter had been doing online.
Passing sentence today, District Judge Khalid Qureshi said: ‘It must be every parent’s worst nightmare to discover their child has been accessing material they should not, of whatever type’. “Sadly many parents are still ignorant of the dangers that easy and unrestricted access to the internet can pose”.
When the girl was arrested in April police seized her Blackberry mobile phone and a sketchpad in which she had written a recipe for explosives. “I wish to make changes, and I can only make them if I get the chance to prove I’m not a terrorist”.
It is created to prevent young people from further offending by placing them under the supervision of the Youth Offending Team for a period of three to 12 months.
Phone data retrieved by police showed the pair exchanged more than 2,000 WhatsApp messages a day before they were arrested.
She told police: “I thought I would one day hack into the White House”. She commented on his plans and “indicated she had plans of her own”, Ledwidge said.
A British teenage girl, romantically linked to a who was boy sentenced to life over an Anzac Day terror plot in Melbourne, has been given a non-custodial sentence by a United Kingdom court.
She was 15 when she used school computers to look for information on the so-called Islamic State (IS) killer Jihadi John, and Michael Adebolajo – the killer of Fusilier Lee Rigby.
The girl’s lawyer, Nasir Hafezi, said the girl felt neglected and unloved at home and so turned to her Muslim religion and the internet and was drawn into anti-Western groups promoting violent action.
The court was told that on the girl’s Blackberry police found the cookbook, the Islamic State group magazine Dabiq and a range of images including that of an execution and people about to be beheaded.
“She became obsessed with the concept of suicide bombing and martyrdom, which she saw as a way out”, he said. “I know it’s a stupid idea”.
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Outside court, Hafezi said the “troubling” case marked a “very sad milestone for the youth court”. We all share a responsibility of tackling extremism and helping keep our communities safe.
