High Court Judge of the Queen’s Bench Division, John Saunders said in his ruling that the teenager would released only if he is found no longer a danger to the public.
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Before his arrest he had exchanged more than 3,000 encrypted mobile app messages with 18-year-old Sevdet Besim.
The boy, nicknamed “the terrorist” by his classmates, was ony 14 when he masterminded the plot to behead police officers at a memorial event in Melbourne, from his bedroom in Lancashire, northwest England.
The Blackburn adolescent will serve for inciting terrorism and certainly will just be released once he’s now not regarded as risky.
“Had the authorities not intervened, [the defendant] would have continued to play his part, hoping and intending that the outcome would be the deaths of a number of people”, Saunders said. “He would have welcomed the notoriety that he would have achieved”.
The judge said it was “chilling” that someone so young could be so radicalized that he was prepared to see people die. The Muslim boy had been radicalised and recruited by IS online and “quickly became a celebrity within the jihadi Twitter community”, his lawyer James Pickup said. The boy was allegedly introduced to Besim by another Australian Abu Khaled al-Cambodi who had joined the terrorist group in Syria.
According to prosecutors, the teen encouraged another young ISIS supporter in Australia to attack police officers.
The Blackburn teenager was also arrested again on the same day but declined to answer questions.
The court heard Besim was friends with Numan Haider, who he also had met at the centre, the latter known to police and would later be shot by officers after an attack outside the Melbourne police station earlier this year. In detention the defendant acknowledged that a “a massacre could have happened” if authorities hadn’t intervened, boasting that it might have made him “ill-famed”.
However the judge said the balance of expert opinion in the case was that he was still risky within the meaning of the Criminal Justice Act.
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He hugged his parents after sentence was passed down before he was led from the courtroom to begin his sentence. The suspect is now aged 15 but he is accused of threatening openly to behead his own teachers, telling them that “you are on my beheading list”.
