THE country’s youngest convicted terrorist, who plotted to behead police officers at the age of 14, is seeking to keep his identity secret for life.
The teenager, from Blackburn, was jailed following his alleged involvement in a plot to behead police officers in an Anzac Day attack in Australia.
Jailed in 2015 for a minimum of five years, the boy was granted anonymity until he reached 18 by a judge at Manchester Crown Court.
But now his lawyers have begun a legal bid to grant him anonymity for life, in a hearing which will take place in October.
It is understood that the teenager’s legal representatives will argue for his lifelong anonymity, citing his right to privacy under human rights law and his desire for a second chance.
The legal bid is unprecedented in a terrorism case in the UK.
If his anonymity is to be granted, he will join some of the country’s most prolific offenders whose identities have been protected, including Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.
The teenager, who hatched the plot to kill police officers in Australia from his bedroom in Blackburn, used a smartphone app to persuade 18-year-old Sevdet Besim to commit mass murder thousands of miles away after he became swiftly radicalised by online Islamic State propaganda.
Over the course of nine days the then 14-year-old boy took on the role of “organiser and adviser” in an alleged Australian jihadist plot to murder police officers by beheading in Melbourne the following month.
A 'major terrorist plot in its late stages' was thwarted when authorities in Britain and Australia intervened and Besim was arrested in possession of a knife a week before the annual war remembrance event.
Speaking in court at the time of the sentencing, Mr Justice Saunders said the defendant’s life term meant he would not be released until he is considered not to be dangerous.
He said: “Thanks to the intervention of the police in this country and in Australia, that attack and the deaths which were intended to follow never happened.
“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.”
He said: “The revelation in this case that someone of only 14 could have become so radicalised that he was prepared to carry out this role intending and wishing that people should die is chilling.”
ITN Solicitors of whom the teenager is a client, said the boy has been granted an interim injunction preventing his identity being made public before a hearing at the High Court in October.
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