Michael Szewczuk
Michael Szewczuk was a 19-year-old Leeds resident who co-founded the Sonnenkrieg Division and was sentenced in June 2019 to four years and three months at the Old Bailey for encouraging terrorism and possessing terrorist manuals including imagery targeting Prince Harry as a 'race traitor' for execution.
Michael Szewczuk, 19, of Leeds, West Yorkshire, was a co-founder of Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD), the British neo-Nazi accelerationist organisation that emerged from the post-proscription milieu of National Action and was modelled on Atomwaffen Division with explicit Order of Nine Angles (O9A) philosophical content incorporated into its ideology. He was sentenced at the Old Bailey on 18 June 2019 by Judge Rebecca Poulet QC to four years and three months in a Young Offenders' Institute after pleading guilty to seven terrorism offences.1
Offences
Szewczuk operated a personal account on the Gab social media platform under a pseudonym and shared administrative control of SKD's Gab page. He pleaded guilty to:
Two counts of encouraging terrorism under section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2006.
Five counts of possessing documents useful to a terrorist under section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000, including the White Resistance Manual and the Al Qaeda Manual.
The Gab content Szewczuk produced and posted included an image of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, with a gun to his head on a blood-spattered background, captioned to identify the Duke as a "race traitor" who should be shot because of his relationship with Meghan Markle. Other content glorified Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer responsible for the 2011 Utoya and Oslo attacks that killed 77 people, and included material calling for ethnic cleansing.1
Sentencing Remarks
Judge Rebecca Poulet QC, sentencing both Szewczuk and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski on the same day, described the content as "abhorrent as well as criminal by reason of their clear intention to encourage terrorist acts."2
Sonnenkrieg Division and O9A
Sonnenkrieg Division was founded by Andrew Dymock after his departure from the System Resistance Network (SRN), incorporating O9A philosophy heavily into SKD's ideological framework. Szewczuk's role was as a co-founder and Gab operator. The Home Secretary proscribed SKD under the Terrorism Act 2000 on February 28, 2020, after Szewczuk and Dunn-Koczorowski had been sentenced.
Relationships 1
Sources
- Washington Post. "Two British teens just convicted for promoting far-right terrorism online." June 18, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/18/two-british-teens-just-convicted-promoting-far-right-terrorism-online/; CNN. "Far-right teen who branded Prince Harry 'race traitor' jailed for four years." June 18, 2019. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/18/uk/teenager-szewczuk-prince-harry-jailed-far-right-extremism-terrorism-gbr-scli-intl/index.html ↩
- HOPE not hate. "Jailed neo-Nazi Satanists were a legacy of National Action." June 18, 2019. https://hopenothate.org.uk/2019/06/18/jailed-neo-nazi-satanists-legacy-national-action/; Yorkshire Post. "Far-right Leeds extremist jailed for 'abhorrent' post branding Prince Harry a 'race traitor'." 2019. https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/crime/far-right-leeds-extremist-jailed-for-abhorrent-post-branding-prince-harry-a-race-traitor-479920 ↩
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