An Islamic State supporter in the United Kingdom who posted thousands of propaganda messages on social media asking “lone wolf” attackers to target Prince George at school pleaded guilty to his crime on Thursday, The Guardian reported. Husnain Rashid, of Lancashire county, had asked people to target the four-year-old heir to the throne after the prince joined Thomas’s Battersea school in London last year.
On October 13, he posted a photograph of the school superimposed with silhouettes of two masked terrorists on his online channel “Lone Mujahid”. Rashid sent a message with the school address saying, “Even the royal family will not be left alone. School starts early.”
But Rashid’s posts on his channel also suggested injecting cyanide into fruits and vegetables at grocery stores and poisoning ice-cream in supermarkets.
The 32-year-old man initially denied all the charges against him, but on Thursday, eight days after the trial began, he pleaded guilty to four of seven counts against him.The Crown Prosecution Service said he had confessed only when he was presented with “the overwhelming weight of evidence against him”, The Guardian reported.
Andy Meeks, the senior investigating officer in the case, said Rashid had posted 3,60,000 messages in 150 different forums on the Telegram messaging application since November 2016.
“For the past week I have listened to the most disturbing allegations,” Judge Andrew Lees
of the Woolwich Crown Court told Rashid. “It is inevitable that you will receive a very lengthy prison sentence and there will be a consideration of a life prison sentence.”
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