LONDON: A convicted white-supremacist terrorist who shared bomb-making instructions online and celebrated the Christchurch mosque massacre has had 18 months added to his jail term by appeal-court judges in London.
Michael Nugent, 38, shared on the Telegram messaging app manuals that showed how to create homemade bombs and firearms, and described the attacks on worshipers at two mosques in New Zealand in March 2019 as a “game-changer.”
In June a court in Kingston, London, convicted him of terror offenses and jailed him for 42 months. But on Friday his sentence was increased to five years after a challenge by the UK’s attorney general, who argued that the penalty was not harsh enough given the seriousness of the crimes.
Nugent was said to have “honored” right-wing terrorists such as Brenton Tarrant, who shot and killed 51 people and injured 40 when he attacked the mosques in Christchurch. Tarrant live-streamed the atrocity on Facebook.
The Independent newspaper reported that Nugent created a video celebrating the attacks to mark the first anniversary of the outrage. In his diary, he wrote that ethnic minorities should be “sent home” and “sterilized,” adding: “Terrorism is the only way out of it.”
Judges said on Friday that the 42-month sentence Nugent was handed in June did not reflect the “obvious gravity” of his online radicalization efforts, which included running Telegram groups that could host up to 200,000 members.
A prosecutor said: “This channel attracted and became a safe haven for anyone who wished to post messages expressing and encouraging extreme racial hatred and violence toward black people.”
Nugent was apprehended after he passed instructions for making bombs and firearms to an undercover police officer who joined his channel.
His defense tried to argue that the terrorist’s actions were a product of deteriorating mental health, but Richard Smith, head of London’s Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, said: “Nugent freely shared his abhorrent extremist views with others over a messaging app and he passed on manuals detailing how to produce deadly weapons and explosive devices. This is another case which shows how harmful online extremism is.”