August 12, 2021 5.24 pm This story is over 31 months old

Lincoln white supremacist guilty of terrorism offences

He’s facing up to 5 years in jail
| Photo: Adobe Stock / terovesalainen
By Local Democracy Reporter

A 21-year-old white supremacist from Lincoln has been found guilty of possession of terrorist instructional material.

Ben John, 21, of Addison Drive, Lincoln, had become part of the Extreme Right Wing online and was found to have neo-Nazi ideologies when his hard drive was seized by police in January this year.

The jury at Leicester Crown Court heard how forensic computer investigators found his hard drive containing the Anarchy Cookbook Version 2000, a radical publication which contains diagrams and instructions on how to construct explosive devices.

The document was apparently aimed at people interested conducting guerrilla warfare in the United States.

John, a criminology student at De Montfort University, had a wealth of white supremacist and anti-semitic material, as well as material relating to Satanist organisations.

The court was told that he first came to the attention of officers in May 2018 after he penned a letter titled Eternal Front – Lincolnshire Fascist Underground.

He was arrested as part of a pre-planned organisation carried out by Counter Terrorism Policing East Midlands on January 7, 2020.

An 11 month investigation by Lincolnshire Police’s Special Branch led to John being charged in November 2020.

The jury voted unanimously to find him guilty of one charge of having in his possession a record of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act. He was cleared of six other counts of the same offence.

The judge reserved praise for the investigation, and called the officers who conducted it a “credit to their force.”

He added that John has been remanded into custody and he sees Ben John as a risk, directly calling him a “convicted terrorist”.

Ben John has been remanded into custody and is due to be sentenced on August 31.