Teenage neo-Nazi who planned suicide bomb attack on synagogue jailed for eight years

Published

1 year ago

June 14, 2024

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A sixth form student from Brighton who drew up plans for a suicide bomb attack on a local synagogue has been jailed for eight years for terrorism offences.

Mason Reynolds, 19, from Moulscoomb was a student studying bricklaying and roofing and doing part-time labouring work on the side.

He lived with his parents and was described as leading “in many ways, a not untypical existence of a young man in his late teens”.

However, Naomi Parsons, prosecuting, told Winchester Crown Court that Reynolds was a neo-Nazi who believed the white race was “destined to dominate the rest of mankind”.

She said Reynolds “does not find himself here because he has political, racial or ideological views that some may find distasteful or indeed abhorrent”.

“He is here because he has not just held those political, racial and ideological views, he has acted on them.”

When Reynolds was arrested, police found a note on his phone created on 7 May 2023 entitled “Enough Larping” – a call to action that referred to ending his “live action role play”.

The note included a 13-second video from Google Maps showing the exterior of Hove Synagogue, and Reynolds had listed its address and the CCTV cameras and fire exits.

He added: “Possible buzzer to get into the building, 1 camera on left side (side entrance locked by gate).”

On another image he had marked “quickest and efficient way in”, adding: “Could be good for surprise attack.”

Reynolds had attached images of synagogues in Missouri and Washington in the US and in Edinburgh as “examples of what to expect inside”.

Underneath he had written: “The Jewish holidays that tend to have the most people in synagogues are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover.”

In June, Reynolds produced an image on a video app called CapCut with the words “Make Jews Afraid Again”.

Later on the same day, a discussion took place on Telegram with another teenager using the sign-on AR15 – a reference to an assault rifle.

Reynolds told him: “I wanna strap multiple pipe [bombs] to my chest and blow myself up inside a synagogue… I have a plan.”

Without identifying his target, he told the other user: “They won’t let me through the buzzer door if suspicious, like Stephan Balliet” – a reference to a German-born neo-Nazi who used homemade weapons to kill two people, after failing to get into a synagogue in Halle, Germany, in October 2019.

Police also discovered Reynolds had copies of the Mujahideen’s Explosives Handbook, the Terrorist’s Handbook, and the Anarchist Cookbook on his computer, along with files used to make a 3D printed assault rifle called the FGC-9.

Reynolds was one of two administrators for the “Far-Right Sigmas” channel on the Telegram app, a neo-Nazi propaganda channel which was set up in late November 2022 by “AR15” in Poland.

The channel promoted the view that society was in decay and the fault lay with Jewish people who controlled the financial institutions, the media and encouraged immigration, resulting in the “dilution” of the white race.

The channel had nearly 350 subscribers and produced content that glorified Nazis including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, leader of the Waffen SS, as well as far-right killers including Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, and Dylann Roof, who killed nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

“It hoped, it seems, to create neo-Nazis of the future,” Ms Parsons said.

One of the clips circulated by Reynolds featured Stephan Balliet, who livestreamed his attempted attack with homemade rifles and bombs.

Speaking of Tarrant, who livestreamed an attack that killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Reynolds commented: “It’d be 10x better seeing Jews get killed.”

In the channel’s chatroom, Reynolds also distributed videos of the Christchurch attack, and Breivik’s attack in Norway in 2011, which killed 67 people.

Much of the material on the channel was edited from propaganda produced by an organisation called Atomwaffen Division, a US based terrorist organisation banned by the UK government in July 2021.

Reynolds pleaded guilty to four offences of possessing material useful for terrorism and five offences of distributing material likely to encourage terrorism. He was found guilty of possessing an article for terrorist purposes.

After his arrest, Reynolds told police he was hurt that his friends viewed him as someone who was “all talk and no action” and wanted them to stop calling him a “LARP” – live action role player.

He had written the note in 15 minutes, forgot to delete it and thought no more about it, he said.

Jailing Reynolds for eight years with an extended licence of five years, Mrs Justice May accepted that he did nothing to carry his plan and that his “secret life” was now out in the open.

But she said she considered him “dangerous” and added: “These ideas are immensely attractive, to young men in particular, and while only a small fraction of those who hold these beliefs act on them, the consequences are catastrophic as history has shown.”

UK

Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Published

1 hour ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Liverpool players past and present have joined the family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva for their funeral in Portugal.

A service was held in the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in their hometown of Gondomar near Porto in northern Portugal on Saturday morning.

Mourners lined the streets and some in the crowd clapped as the brothers’ coffins were carried into the church.

The funeral – in pictures

Jota, 28, leaves behind his wife of only 11 days, Rute Cardoso, and three young children.

His younger brother, 25, was an attacking midfielder for Penafiel in the second tier of Portuguese football.

Liverpool manager Arne Slot, captain Virgil Van Dijk and teammates including Andy Robertson, Conor Bradley, Ryan Gravenberch, Cody Gakpo, Curtis Jones, Darwin Nunez and Joe Gomez were seen at the service.

Former teammates Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Fabinho were also there.

Van Dijk carried a red wreath with Jota’s number 20, while Robertson had a wreath featuring number 30, Silva’s number at Penafiel.

Some of Jota’s teammates in the Portuguese national side also attended, including Bruno Fernandes, of Manchester United, Ruben Dias and Bernardo Silva, of Manchester City, Joao Felix and Renato Veiga, of Chelsea, Nelson Semedo, from Wolves, Joao Moutinho and Rui Patricio.

Ruben Neves was one of the pallbearers after flying in from Florida where he played for Al Hilal in the Club World Cup quarter-final on Friday night.

‘More than a friend’

In a post published on Instagram before the service, he told Jota he had been “more than a friend, we’re family, and we won’t stop being that way just because you’ve decided to sign a contract a little further away from us!”

Jota’s fellow Liverpool midfielder, Alexis Mac Allister, said on Instagram: “I can’t believe it. I’ll always remember your smiles, your anger, your intelligence, your camaraderie, and everything that made you a person. It hurts so much; we’ll miss you. Rest in peace, dear Diogo.”

Porto FC president Andre Villas-Boas and Portugal national team manager Roberto Martinez were also in attendance.

‘With us forever’

Speaking after the ceremony, Martinez said the period since their deaths had been “really, really sad days, as you can imagine, but today we showed we are a large, close family.

“Their spirit will be with us forever.”

The service was private, but the words spoken by the Bishop of Porto, Manuel Linda, were broadcast to those standing outside the church.

He told Jota’s children, who were not at the service, that he was praying for them specifically, as well as their mother and grandparents.

“There are no words, but there are feelings,” he said, adding: “We also suffer a lot and we are with you emotionally.”

The brothers died after a Lamborghini they were travelling in burst into flames following a suspected tyre blowout in the early hours of Thursday morning.

No other vehicles are said to have been involved in the incident.

Liverpool have delayed the return of their players for pre-season following Jota’s death and players past and present paid tribute to him and his brother on social media.

Flowers have been left outside Anfield, where flags have been lowered to half-mast and all club shops, museums and tours have been closed until Monday.

UK

Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Published

4 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.

MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.

Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.

In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.

“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.

“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.

“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”

Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.

The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.

It comes after Ms Reeves said she was “totally” up to continuing as chancellor after appearing tearful at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Criticising Sir Keir for the U-turns on benefit reform during PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the chancellor looked “absolutely miserable”, and questioned whether she would remain in post until the next election.

Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”

In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.

“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”

Sir Keir also told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby on Thursday that he “didn’t appreciate” that Ms Reeves was crying in the Commons.

“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.

“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”

UK

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva’s funeral in pictures

Published

5 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota and Andre Silva's funeral in pictures

The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.

The Liverpool forward, 28, and his brother died in a car crash in Spain on Thursday.

Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.