A British teenager who planned to sabotage an Elton John concert in London by plotting to bomb the area on the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks was jailed for life on Monday.
The culprit, Haroon Syed, 19, hailing from West London, pleaded guilty to planning a terrorist attack between the April and September of 2016 and has been ordered to serve life imprisonment for at least 16-and-a-half years.
Syed admitted to researching potentital targets on the internet, including an Elton John concert in Hyde Park and Oxford Street, a busy shopping district.
“Haroon Syed is clearly a danger to the public who was prepared to carry out indiscriminate attacks against innocent people,” stated Deb Walsh, deputy head of the Counter Terrorism Division.
Syed used the Internet to try to buy weapons to use in a possible attack and used social media to make connections with people he believed were like-minded supporters of Daesh. In one message he said, “So after some damage with machine gun then do ishtadi (martyrdom).. that’s what I’m planning to do.”
He applied for loans amounting to a total of 8,000 pounds ($10,362.40), which he said were for a motobrike, a wedding and home improvements, but prosecutors allege that they were to fund the attack and bring the plan into action. The loan requests were turned down.
Britain has traced a rise in militant attacks in 2017; a bombing was held in May at a concert by the US pop singer Ariana Grande in Manchester, killing 22 people.
