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The case brings the number of convicted members of National Action to 19. Six others were found guilty of other terrorist offences.
Chris Lythgoe, 32 – a warehouse worker from Warrington, Cheshire, who took over as leader, of National Action was jailed for eight years in July 2018 for keeping the group running.
Lythgoe, who led the North West region of the group, told members they would be shedding ‘one skin for another’ after National Action was banned for supporting the killing of Jo Cox.
Matt Hankinson, 24 – Lythgoe’s right hand man, was jailed for six years for continuing his membership of National Action after they were banned.
Hankinson, a boxing fan from middle class Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, and a firebrand speaker, organised their marches.
Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen, 34 – a British Army veteran of the Afghan conflict, was at the heart of a National Action recruitment drive in the armed forces.
Vehvilainen believed in an approaching race war and wanted to help establish an all-white stronghold in a Welsh village.
Officers uncovered a legally held shotgun, a replica of a Medieval war hammer, swastika bunting and other Nazi paraphernalia.
The Royal Anglian Regiment soldier was convicted in March 2018 of being a member of National Action, and jailed for eight years.
Alex Deakin, 24 – from Great Barr, Birmingham, was caught on CCTV along with others, putting up racially offensive stickers on Aston University campus.
The stickers had slogans including ‘White Zone’ and ‘Britain is ours – the rest must go’.
In rants on the encrypted Telegram app, Deakin told fellow National Action members that in a future ‘race war’, the organisation would have a ‘KKK (Ku Klux Klan)-themed death squad’.
Deakin, the Midlands organiser for National Action, was arrested while cowering in an airing cupboard after bragging that ‘incompetent’ counter-terrorism officers would never catch up with him.
Deakin was sentenced in April 2018 to 12 months for inciting racial hatred and eight years for being a member of a proscribed organisation.
Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38 – who named their baby son after Hitler, were convicted of membership of a terrorist group in November 2018.
The couple, from Banbury, Oxfordshire, had given their child the middle name Adolf, in ‘admiration’ of Hitler, Thomas said.
Photographs recovered from their home also showed Thomas cradling his newborn son while wearing the hooded white robes of a Ku Klux Klansman.
Thomas, a former Amazon security guard from Erdington in Birmingham and a twice-failed Army applicant, was jailed for six-and-a-half years and Patatas, a photographer originally from Portugal, was given five years.
Daniel Bogunovic – a warehouse worker from Crown Hills Rise, Leicester, and a leading figure in National Action’s Midlands division, stood on trial alongside Thomas and Patatas. He was jailed for six years and four months
Three other men who had been due to stand trial alongside the trio, admitted being National Action members before the trial began.
Joel Wilmore, 24 – of Stockport, Greater Manchester was sentenced to five years and 10 months; Nathan Pryke, 26, of March, Cambridgeshire, was given five years and five months; and Darren Fletcher, 28, of Wednesfield, West Midlands was given three years and four months. All pleaded guilty to the same offence.
Alice Cutter, 23 – adopted the name Buchenwald Princess, when she was the runner up in an online beauty pageant run by National Action, seeking to find ‘Miss Hitler.’
Mark Jones, 25 – Cutter’s fiancé contributed artwork, organised training camps and was involved in ‘grooming’ recruits for a continuity group called the Triple K Mafia – a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.
Jones posed in the execution chamber at the Buchenwald concentration camp, giving a Nazi salute, alongside Alex Davies.
The pair, who lived in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, were involved in trying to recruit schoolgirls aged 15 and 16, as part of a plan for teenage recruitment.
Cutter was jailed for three years and Jones for five-and-a-half years at Birmingham Crown Court in June 2020.
Two others in the group were also found guilty of membership of a banned organisation.
Connor Scothern, 19 – was just 15 when he started to get involved with National Action.
His father had tried to warn him, sending a message that read: ‘You sound a bit brainwashed are you sure you’re not being groomed?’
Scothern, from Nottingham, described as an ‘enthusiastic and wholly committed member’ was jailed for 18 months.
Garry Jack, 24 – from Birmingham, was jailed for four and a half years after he plastered the University of Aston with stickers supporting National Action and used a National Front march in Grantham to try and recruit more followers.
‘I am desperate to live an ordinary, functional, happy life with my family and redeem myself. I cannot change my past but I hope my future can make up for it,’ he told the judge.
Daniel Ward, 29 – from Birmingham, pleaded guilty to membership and was jailed for three years in July 2019.
He applied to join National Action via an email in October 2016, saying: ‘All I have to offer is my thirst for gratuitous violence. I consider myself fanatical in my beliefs. As much as I’ve been told all my life that Hitler was this and that – he was right.’
Benjamin Hannam, 22 – from Edmonton, North London, acted as a recruiter for National Action and attended meetings, just weeks before he applied to join the Metropolitan Police.
Hannam joined Iron March first using the name Anglisc and later Jin Roh, a Japanese Manga cartoon about a police officer in the 1950s.
He featured in a recruitment video for NS131, with his face obscured, just two days before making an application to the police in July 2017 and was jailed for four years and four months in April last year.
Ben Raymond, 32 – from Swindon, Wiltshire, became the ‘Joseph Goebbels’ for National Action and coined the expression ‘white jihad’ to invoke the image of violent ethnic cleansing.
Raymond, a politics undergraduate at Essex University, designed much of the publicity material for National Action.
In one picture, a parody of Reservoir Dogs, Raymond was marked as ‘Zyklon Ben’, a reference to Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used in the Nazi gas chambers.
He was jailed for eight years for membership of a banned group and downloading bomb-making instructions, earlier this year.
David Musins, a National Action member who took over the London region after Jones moved to Yorkshire pleaded guilty to membership of National Action earlier this year and is awaiting sentence.
OTHER OFFENCES
Jack Renshaw, 23 – from Skelmersdale, Lancashire, who planned to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper was jailed for life with a minimum of 20 years, in May 2019.
He admitted preparing an act of terrorism, saying he wanted to ‘replicate’ the murder of Jo Cox, buying a sword to kill the West Lancashire MP and making threats to kill police officer Det Con Victoria Henderson, who was investigating him for child sex offences.
Jack Coulson, 19 – a Nazi-obsessed teenager from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, was sent to a young offenders institution for four years and eight months in July 2018 for downloading a bomb-making manual.
Coulson had previously escaped without a custodial sentence for making a pipe-bomb in his bedroom but was banned from using the internet
That jury was told that police had been tipped off by a member of the public concerned about his Snapchat messages.
One Snapchat image was of a mosque being blown up along with the words: ‘It’s time to enact retribution upon the Muslim filth.’
Another had a picture of a pipe bomb with a view of the Bradford skyline and the message: ‘Incendiary explosive and home-made black powder. More to come.’
Zack Davies, 26 – was jailed for life for the attempted murder of Sarandev Bhambra, a Sikh trainee dentist, in Mold, North Wales in June 2015.
Dr Bhambra was struck in the head and nearly lost a hand in the attack suffering ‘life changing injuries’.
Davies claimed the attack was revenge for the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and chanted ‘white power’ as he launched the attack.
Davies told police that he was a member of National Action, although the group denied any association with him.
Wayne Bell, 37 – from Castleford, West Yorkshire, was jailed for four years and three months in May 2018 for posting racist and anti-Semitic messages on Twitter.
Bell had been a prominent member of National Action before it was banned and featured in two posters used in a recruitment campaign.
He had posted an image on a Russian social media site showing a man being hung by a rope with a Star of David on his forehead, the CPS said.
In August 2016 he posted a photo of a police officer’s foot raised above the head of an unarmed black man, lying on the ground with the words: ‘The only way.’
Garron Helm, 21 – from Seaforth, Merseyside, a friend of Andy Clarke, was sentenced to four weeks in prison in October 2014, for sending an obscene Twitter message to the MP Luciana Berger relating to her Jewish background.
He had written: ‘I’m not a lunatic for embracing martyrdom, I’ve just accepted that I could be more use in death than life.’
Helm was put on the Prevent de-radicalisation programme and acquitted of continued membership of National Action in July 2018.
Lawrence Burns, 26 – from Cambridge, was jailed for four years in March 2017 for making anti-Semitic comments and sharing artwork of Adolf Hitler on Facebook.
He was also prosecuted for making a racist speech at a memorial demonstration for American white supremacist leader David Lane.
In the speech, which was later shared online on YouTube, Burns was heard to refer to Jews as ‘parasites’ that wanted to create a ‘mongrelised race’.
In one post, he wrote: ‘The white race is the only race that can boost evolution. The rest of the other races must be eliminated.’
