- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Keerthi Mohan
A REDHILL TEEN who planned a terror attack with a hunting knife was on Friday (28) jailed for six years for offences he committed when he was 16 and 17 years old.
Daesh supporter Haider Ahmed, 19, from Redhill in Surrey, was found guilty of preparing an act of terrorism at an earlier hearing at Kingston Crown Court. He was accused of planning an attack with a “massive” hunting knife and financing terror activity by travelling abroad.
The court heard that Ahmed, then a 17-year-old sixth form student, became radicalised by watching beheading videos.
Andrew Hall QC, who defended Ahmed, said: “He came across highly effective radicalisers who were fishing for the young, the isolated and the gullible. They found this boy in his bedroom in Surrey and he was brainwashed with a pernicious ideology and they turned him into their creature.”
Sentencing, Judge Peter Lodder QC said: “I very much hope that you take advantage of the programmes available to you in prison and realise that radicalisation is not the way forward for you.”
Outside court, Ahmed’s sister said the government should take action on internet sites promoting Daesh ideology.
“My brother was only 16, even less than that, when he began searching all of this and it shouldn’t have been accessible to him in the first place,” she said. “I’m very disappointed there was not enough protection.”
Det Ch Supt Kath Barnes, head of Counter Terrorism Policing South East, called Ahmed “a dangerous young man” who possessed a significant amount of “shocking material promoting a warped ideology.”
