A gap in the law for violent loners who plot mass killings will be closed, a minister has vowed.
Dan Jarvis said the Government will act quickly after a terrorism watchdog demanded an urgent law change following the Southport murders. The Security Minister said he strongly supports creating a specific criminal offence for plotting to kill two or more people.
It comes after Jonathan Hall KC, in a sweeping review of the UK’s counter-terror laws, said there was a “real and not theoretical gap” in the law. Mr Hall rejected widening the definition of terrorism.
In a statement Mr Jarvis said: “The Prime Minister has been clear that if the law needs to change to recognise this new and dangerous threat, then we will change it – and quickly.”
Addressing Mr Hall’s call for a new criminal charge, the Home Office minister said: “We accept and strongly support this recommendation. I can confirm we will fix the legislation to close the gaps identified.”
In a report commissioned after Axel Rudakubana’s sickening murders of three young girls in Southport, Mr Hall pointed to the case of Nicholas Prosper, 19. Prosper murdered his mother and two siblings and planned a mass shooting at his old primary school in Luton.
The review said that despite police discovering a loaded shotgun and more than 30 cartridges, there was no specific offence that he could be charged with for planning the school shooting last year. Mr Hall warned there is a danger that mass killings could start a copycat craze. He was tasked with examining terror legislation by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper “in light of modern threats we face”.
Mr Hall told the BBC: “The internet is really causing problems here. A lot of lone young men, generally, are getting these ideas from the internet that really extreme violence is the solution, and Rudakubana seems to have been one of those people.”
It came after Keir Starmer warned of a new threat from “extreme violence carried out by loners, misfits, young men in their bedrooms” following the Southport murders. Rudakubana stabbed Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, to death and tried to kill eight other children and two adults.
His attack was not treated as terrorism because there was no evidence he was motivated by ideology. But Mr Hall cautioned against widening the definition of terrorism, saying it is “already wide”, and expanding it would “increase the possibility of inaccurate use and, in theory, abuse”.
He went on: “It would risk major false positives – the prosecution of people who by no stretch of the imagination are terrorists – and extend terrorism liability into novel terrain.”
The move would also result in “unacceptable restrictions on freedom of expression”, he said.