LONDON, Jan 16 (Reuters) - A British teenager who praised the killer of three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event and said he planned to bomb an Oasis reunion concert was sentenced to 14 months' detention on Friday for possession of an al Qaeda manual.
McKenzie Morgan, 18, was arrested at his home in Wales after sending messages on social media platform Snapchat in which he praised Axel Rudakubana, who murdered three girls and stabbed 10 others in July 2024, prosecutor Corinne Bramwell said.
Morgan told a psychiatric nurse on the morning of his arrest in June that he "planned to commit a Rudakubana-style terrorist attack" and had been researching how to stab people, Bramwell told Morgan's sentencing hearing at London's Old Bailey court.
The teenager twice tried to buy a 15-centimetre (6-inch) kitchen knife from Amazon, searched online for local playgrounds and a youth dance academy and put the academy on a document on his mobile phone entitled "places to attack", Bramwell added.
She said Morgan later told another Snapchat user that he planned to bomb the concert by British rock band Oasis in Cardiff last July 4, the band's first gig of their comeback tour, and claimed to have tried to make the deadly poison ricin.
Britain's Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement that "the evidence showed that he was fantasising ... rather than making concrete plans or taking steps to carry out an attack".
"There was also no evidence of a terrorist purpose," the CPS added. "As a result, the CPS did not pursue charges for planning or attempting an attack."
Morgan was arrested on June 2 and a 188-page al Qaeda training manual was found on one of his electronic devices. Morgan pleaded guilty to a single count of possession of information likely to be of use to a person engaged in terrorism.
Morgan accepted having saved the al Qaeda manual and reading it, but told police he had no intention of committing an attack and simply intended to shock others with his messages.
He has been diagnosed with autism and two psychiatrists assessed Morgan as being vulnerable to being groomed or radicalised online, Bramwell told the court.
Judge Sarah Whitehouse sentenced Morgan to 14 months' detention in a young offenders' institution.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin; Editing by Alex Richardson, Aidan Lewis)
