The Central Criminal Court (commonly known as Old Bailey) sentenced a UK teenager on Monday to three years and four months in jail on charges of collecting and sharing terrorist material.
Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the 18-year-old Londoner, identified as Sudesh Amman, was arrested in May following a 24-hour investigation. The Met's detectives located the suspect on a tip-off by a Dutch blogger, who had published a screengrab of one of Amman's Telegram messages, which showed a knife and two guns on top of an Islamic flag, captioned "Armed and ready April 3".
"They (detectives) recovered a plethora of evidence which not only proved Amman's criminality but demonstrated the worrying extent of his terrorist mindset", said Acting Commander Alexis Boon, who heads the Met Police counter-terrorism command.
The evidence included manuals on combat training, knife attacks, and bomb making. There was more to prove Amman's intentions: the investigators obtained the messages that he had sent to his girlfriend, in which he encouraged her to chop off the heads of her "kuffar" (disbelieving) parents.
The would-be terrorist also ostensibly shared links on Skype to graphic videos of violence by Daesh, a terror group infamously known for torture and beheadings of hostages.
"Through the evidence officers recovered, we were able to show the court that Amman had a fierce interest in violence and martyrdom. His fascination with dying in the name of terrorism was clear in a notepad we recovered from his home", Alexis Boon noted, adding that among his goals was dying a martyr and going to the afterlife.