An ISIS-obsessed teen who was watching, promoting, and distributing disturbing Islamic State propaganda has been jailed for six years after buying a long executioner’s knife and planning a terror attack similar to the London Bridge massacre.
Haider Ahmed was only 14 when he started watching ISIS videos and following their recruiters online. Radicalized by their ideas, the boy bought a massive knife that he planned to use to kill people when he was 17 years old.
Now-19-year-old Ahmed has also built an online persona and began making his own videos while actively engaging in conversations with ISIS recruiters from other countries and even helped people get recruited through his connections.
Ahmed has also connected with Omar Ali Hussain, a notorious ISIS recruiter who’s based in the UK.
“Can we do inghamasi [suicide attack] in the UK?” Ahmed asked the recruiter to which he responded by saying: “Na’am akhi [Yes brother]”
Sentencing the 19-year-old to six years in prison, Judge Peter Lodder QC said the teen has a “callous disregard” for others’ lives while pointing out he bought a “terrifyingly large and vicious looking weapon of the upmost dangerousness” with the purpose of murdering innocent people.
“We may be surprised at the extent to which this is going on in bedrooms across the home counties,” Andy Hall QC added.
“Haider Ahmed was living a dull routine with little excitement but in his bedroom he can be anybody he chooses to be because of the anonymity of an online life – he can be the big ‘I am,’ no longer a little kid.”
The teen’s evil plans surfaced after the authorities seized his phone on suspicion of bank fraud. On his cell phone, however, the detectives found disturbing content.
Allegedly, Ahmed had told one of his connects that he wanted to do inghamasi, a suicide attack.
“We need to do this [for the sake of god], they’re eradicating our people. We won’t stand for this. We will collapse their country as they’re collapsing ours,” he wrote.
“I came home on train today and even imagined doing it. I’m not waiting for anything. I don’t have any money for [moving], so I’m gonna open the doors of jihad here inshAllah. If I had the equipment, I’d do it tomorrow inshAllah.”
He also asked 24-year-old Imdadul Karim from London to buy the deadly weapon for him because he was still 17 at the time.
“I wanna ruin some people’s faces or dip them in the leg, lol,” the young fanatic wrote, asking Karim to provide him with a weapon.
“All of these offenses occurred when you were aged 16 and 17. Now you are within a month of your twentieth birthday,” Judge Peter Lodder added.
“You collected, shared and discussed extreme material, involving details of martyrdom, the most efficient ways of killing in suicide attacks, weapons that may be used, parts of the body which are most vulnerable.
“This material covered topics such as the Islamic State caliphate cyber army, a one-way ticket to Jannah [heavan], brutal images of executions and the burning to death of a Jordanian pilot captured by Islamic State.
“Your communications referred to prominent Islamic State supporters such as Anjem Choudhury, to Islamic State terrorist attacks such as the cutting of the throat of a priest in France and to other major terrorist attacks. The knife you bought was a terrifyingly large and vicious looking weapon of the upmost dangerousness.”
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