Stafford man who called for ‘killing migrants’ pleads guilty to terrorism offences

A rightwing extremist who called for “killing migrants when they arrive on their boats” has pleaded guilty to terrorism offences. Ivan Jennings, 46, from Stafford, admitted encouraging terrorism between 15 August and 14 November 2024 at Leicester crown court on Monday. He had previously pleaded guilty to dissemination of a terrorism publication at a hearing in August. That charge related to a manifesto written by Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in terror attacks in Norway in 2011, and an attempt to fuel a rightwing, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim conflict. A court previously heard Jennings was a member of a number of extreme rightwing social media chat groups and had encouraged others to emulate the Australian white nationalist Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people and tried to kill 40 others in terror attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Jennings had also discussed molotov cocktails and “killing migrants when they arrive on their boats”, the prosecutor Lee Ingham told the Old Bailey in January. Jennings, who remains on conditional bail, denied possession of a document for terrorist purposes, namely Tarrant’s The Great Replacement, on 14 November 2024, but the judge, Andrew Lockhart KC, said this count would lie on the file at his sentencing on 4 September at Leicester crown court. Last month the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) raised the UK national threat level from “substantial” to “severe”. …