CST research puts Neo-Nazi in prison

On 8^th April, a self-confessed neo-Nazi, Thomas Leech from Preston, was jailed for two years for a string of offences after CST uncovered his anonymous online activities, worked out his identity and reported him to counter-terrorist police. Leech pleaded guilty to seven offences, including encouraging acts of terrorism, stirring up religious or racial hatred and making indecent photographs of a child. He will serve his time in a young offenders institution due to his age.

Leech, 19-years-old, posted extreme right-wing, antisemitic and racist material online and was strident and explicit in his support of violence and terrorism against Jewish and Muslim communities in the UK. The police investigation, began in February 2020 after “a report was made to police identifying an online user posting hateful and racist comments”. This report was made by CST as a result of CST’s investigations into online networks of extreme right wing activists in the UK.

CST’s work investigating and exposing people who may pose a violent threat to the Jewish community is the virtual frontline of our work protecting the community from terrorism and hate crime. It is the invisible partner to our extensive physical security protection for the community, conducted using sophisticated technology and the latest Open Source Intelligence techniques. Leech is not the first to be prosecuted and imprisoned using information provided to the police by CST.

Leech’s activities typify the forums and environments online that are used by extreme right-wing networks in the UK and abroad. His activity on the platform Gab reflected the ease by which such individuals can find and repost extreme, graphic, and well produced material to further their and other’s radicalisation and extremism.

In this case, CST pieced together fragments of Leech’s biographical information from anonymous accounts that he was using across seven different social media platforms, to work out his identity and approximate location. Significantly, only one of these platforms was a mainstream social media site; the others were smaller, more obscure platforms favoured either by extremists or by gamers.

Leech’s online profiles demonstrated an explicit admiration for far-right terrorists including Brenton Tarrant, perpetrator of the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Anders Breivik, who carried out an IED and firearms attack in Norway. His posts signalled he had first-hand access to Tarrant’s manifesto and he praised their attacks as “truly incredible”. 

Leech’s activities typify the forums and environments online that are used by extreme right-wing networks in the UK and abroad. His activity on the platform Gab reflected the ease by which such individuals can find and repost extreme, graphic, and well produced material to further their and other’s radicalisation and extremism.

His chosen online usernames showed the graphically dehumanised way in which he viewed Muslim communities. Significantly, Leech parroted a common extreme right-wing belief that Jews are responsible for causing immigration into western societies, while expressing combined hatred of Jews and Muslims as in his own words, “Jews are the disease: Muslims are the symptom”.

Leech’s antisemitism, being symptomatic of so much extreme right-wing thought, ‘punched up’. He seemed to genuinely believe tropes relating to Jewish power and influence. This form of antisemitism, which is present also in many conspiracy theory circles, continues to place Jews as a powerful and controlling minority able to shape global affairs to their benefit. Leech claimed in one Gab post that the only people truly aware of the current global affairs are “Jews and National socialists”, who he perceived to be enemies of each other. 

Leech also indulged in antisemitism and conspiracies that have motivated other extreme right-wing attacks against synagogues in the US. In one post, Leech claimed that “Jews introduced, and actively fund and promote, the flow of Muslims into England”, the stated aim of this being “our extermination” (in reference to the White community). This very same conspiracy – that Jews are responsible for undermining the white race – was referenced in Robert Bowers’ Gab profile prior to his attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.

 CST’s online investigation into extremist networks in the UK continue to highlight the centrality of antisemitism to such actors. Leech is merely one of dozens of similar individuals that CST has investigated and referred to counter terrorism policing partners to help ensure extremists cannot act on their word and conduct real world attacks against Jewish, or other, communities in the UK.

(Source: Lancashire Police)