Two British far-right university students were jailed for terrorism offenses after disseminating a racist post online about Prince Harry following his marriage to Meghan Markle, a mixed-race American.
Michal Szewczuk, 19, posted the image, which also featured a blood-splattered swastika, on microblogging platform Gab in August last year, months after the prince married mixed-race actress Meghan Markle. The post included the phrase "See Ya Later Race Traitor." Szewczuk, who was jailed for four years and three months, pleaded guilty to two counts of encouraging terrorism and five counts of possession of terrorist material, including the "White Resistance Manual" and an Al-Qaida manual.
He was sentenced at London's Old Bailey court alongside 18-year-old Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, who admitted two counts of encouraging terrorism after the pair engaged in the same online chat rooms. Dunn-Koczorowski received an 18-month jail term.
Szewczuk and Dunn-Koczorowski were reportedly members of the far-right group Sonnenkrieg Division, described as the "third generation" of banned terrorist group National Action. In 2017, a Nazi-obsessed loner murdered lawmaker Jo Cox in a frenzied street attack a week before the referendum on the European Union. Since then, Britain has banned National Action and two other spin-off groups, the first extremist right-wing organizations to be outlawed since the 1940s.
Britain has been facing a new and significant threat from organized far-right terrorism. British police foiled four extreme right-wing terror plots in 2017, according to the country's chief counterterrorism officer.
