MI5 confirms it was monitoring lady as UK’s youngest terror suspect

A teenager believed to have taken her own life after she was groomed by far-right extremists and later arrested on suspicion of terror offences was being monitored by MI5, an inquest has heard. 

Rhianan Rudd, 16, was found dead at a children’s home on May 19 2022, around 18 months after she was detained for downloading a bomb-making manual online and accused of plotting a terrorist attack.

The teen was the youngest person charged with terror offences in the UK.  

A statement from the security service was read to the pre-inquest review hearing into Rhianan’s death at Chesterfield Coroner’s Court confirming that MI5 ‘provided police with intelligence’ during their criminal investigation.

The teenager, who had autism, was charged with various offences in April 2021 and was due to stand trial in March 2022, but charges were dropped after the Home Office ruled she was a victim of sexual exploitation by two American far-right extremists Christopher Cook and Dax Mallaburn. 

Mother Emily Carter with Rhianan Rudd / Rhianan took her own life in 2022. She was youngest person at 15yo to be charged with terrorism offences

Rhianan Rudd’s mother says she should have been seen as a victim rather than a terrorist, as it was discovered that she had been groomed by American far-right extremists

Mallaburn had met Rhianan’s mother Emily Carter via a pen pal system for prisoners.  

It was also later revealed that police and MI5 knew Rhianan may have been a victim of child sexual exploitation for at least a year – before she was even arrested.

Edward Pleeth, counsel to the inquest, read the statement to the court which said: ‘MI5 confirms that they provided police with intelligence in the course of the police investigation.

‘MI5 did not take the decision to arrest or charge, or the subsequent decision to discontinue prosecution.’

Jesse Nicholls, representing Rhianan’s mother, said: ‘Rhianan was a child who died in circumstances involving an exceptional period of state involvement leading up to her death.

‘It appears it (MI5) was monitoring her, and getting information about what steps it then took is relevant and should be examined.’

Neil Sheldon KC, representing the Home Office, including MI5, said in the hearing: ‘We accept you will be scrutinising sensitive material very carefully to see what if any information was known about the risk of self-harm or suicide and what if anything was done in respect of that information.

‘We maintain that this is not a case in which it is necessary to assess the substance of the underlying intelligence collected by MI5.’

Chief coroner Alexia Durran also heard that although MI5 ‘considers matters such as mental health’ in its duties, the provision of ‘care and support is not part of its statutory functions or role’.

Charges against Rhianan were dropped after evidence emerged she had been groomed by US neo-Nazi Christopher Cook, pictured, and Ms Carter’s one-time partner Dax Mallaburn, a fellow American white supremacist

Mallaburn, pictured, met Rhianan’s mother via a pen pal system for prisoners

Mr Sheldon continued: ‘There is also an important distinction between the obligation to protect individuals from a real and immediate threat to life and a general obligation to provide care and support.’

The full inquest begins on February 26 next year and is expected to last three weeks.

At a pre-inquest hearing back in May, Nicholls had also said that ‘the behaviour of the state may have been a contributory factor before she took her own life at a children’s home in May last year’. 

He called for the inquest to consider ‘possible state responsibility’ in relation to the ‘impact on Rhianan’s state of mind’.

Chesterfield Coroner’s Court heard police and MI5 knew Rhianan may have been a victim of child sexual exploitation for at least a year – before she was even arrested.

But they continued to proceed with prosecution for alleged offences. Rhianan was charged with terror offences in April 2021 and was set to face a trial last year. Charges were not withdrawn until December 2021.

Rhianan, who moved to Derbyshire with her family from Essex in 2012, began being investigated by police in September 2020 after her mother referred her to the anti-radicalisation scheme Prevent. The teen was studying for her GSCEs at the time of her death and was living at a residential home in Nottinghamshire.

Speaking to Mail Online in January, Rhianan’s mother said of the police and MI5: ‘They should have seen her as a victim rather than a terrorist.’

Ms Carter said: ‘She became very withdrawn, very secretive. You’d say ‘what you been doing upstairs’ and she would say ‘nothing’ where before she would say she was ‘searching, doing this, doing that.’

‘She wasn’t racist at all and then, all of a sudden, she didn’t like blacks, didn’t like Jews, didn’t like anybody who wasn’t white.

‘If you didn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes and were Aryan, as they say, she didn’t want to know you, you were an inferior race, you shouldn’t have been alive.’

Ms Carter told how her daughter became obsessed with neo-Nazism and was soaking up views ‘like a sponge.’

In May it was also revealed that when officers last spoke to Rhianan in April 2022, a month before her death, she was concerned about being trolled online and about a historical Telegram account which had resurfaced but police told her they wouldn’t take further action about that, according to Claire Palmer, representing Derbyshire Police.

Palmer had also said that  Rhianan was ‘at some degree, in crisis’. 

‘What the police found was a vulnerable, complex young lady where there were very serious issues’.