There’s been an interesting and worrying story being carried by the BBC about a 14 year old boy who converted to Islam and who was later caught by police allegedly ‘preparing’ for a terrorist attack. As the BBC story says he is alleged to have researched the construction of explosives and had created a shrapnel bomb and made videos that expressed his desire to become a ‘martyr’.
Here’s the BBC story in full just in case the BBC decide for their own reasons to remove it.
A 14-year-old boy has appeared in court accused of trying to make homemade bombs containing shrapnel.
The teenager, from Eastleigh, was arrested on Friday after concerns were raised by social services.
He appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court charged with one count of preparation of a terrorist act.
The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is thought to be the youngest person ever accused of planning a terrorist attack in the UK.
The defendant did not enter a plea and was remanded in youth detention.
He is next due to appear at the Old Bailey on Monday 22 June.
The court was told the boy had converted to Islam.
It is alleged he researched how to make explosives, constructed a series of devices with the aim of making them explosive devices containing shrapnel, and had recorded a video saying he wanted to be a martyr.
Reading between the lines here and also taking care not to prejudice the case, both the remand in custody and the issue of a alleged shrapnel based device, do seem to place this at the higher end of offending. This does not look to me like someone just downloading a few copies of an ISIS magazine or LARPing as a jihadi, or making their own fireworks, this looks like something much more serious.
However what bothers me is that this person is not an individual subjected from birth by Islamic brainwashing, a background story that many Islamic terrorists share, this person was converted to Islam. This raises all sorts of questions that the BBC article does not answer both because it may not have come out in court and also because of reporting restrictions that exist in Britain prior to cases coming before a Jury.
It may well be that we will have more information coming out about this case when it finally comes to Crown Court and is put in front of a Jury. But my big question about this case and one that I hope will be answered is who converted this boy? Someone must have approached or groomed him to convert to Islam and go down the path that he is alleged to have gone down? Did t this conversion start online or in a school or after an RE visit to a mosque or was it peer group persuasion that caused this conversion to Islam? I hope that such information comes out at the Crown Court trial at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey. As the boy is under the age of 18, there will be reporting restrictions that will be in place even if the boy is convicted, unless the restrictions are overruled by the trial judge. We will not be told the defendant’s name and if the conversion was done or encouraged by one of the boy’s peers we will not be told the name of them either.
What strikes me as odd about this case is the town the boy comes from is not exactly known to be a hotbed of either Islam or Islamic extremism, Muslims make up the tiniest minority of the local population at 0.31% of the town’s 120,000 population (2001 figures) which makes me wonder if local or peer group pressure is a realistic factor here in his conversion?
Someone has converted this boy to this death cult and we should be told the who, where and why of this conversion. This is because there may be other British children who may be being targeted for conversion in a similar way to how this boy may have been targeted and British parents may want to prevent such conversions and protect their children from the harm that will more than likely come from them.
