Harry Vaughan: Son of House of Lord's clerk a 'neo-Nazi Satanist'

The son of a House of Lords clerk was a neo-Nazi Satanist who encouraged terrorism, a court has heard.

Prosecutors said Harry Vaughan, 18, had an "extreme right-wing and racist mindset", and "an interest in explosives, firearms and violence".

An Old Bailey sentencing hearing was told he had also downloaded indecent videos of children.

Vaughan, from south-west London, admitted 14 terror offences and two of possessing indecent images.

Prosecutor Dan Pawson-Pounds told the court Vaughan, who had been a pupil at Tiffin Grammar School in Kingston upon Thames, held a "hybrid" ideology "of left-hand path Satanism and the neo-Nazi lifestyle of 'accelerationism'.

"Both these doctrines are at the most extreme fringe of Satanism and neo-Nazism," he said.

Accelerationism is a belief that an inevitable collapse of civilisation should be accelerated through acts of terrorism and criminality.

The court heard Vaughan, a "focused and able" pupil who achieved A* in his A-Levels, was arrested in his bedroom in June 2019.

It was the result of an investigation into 'Fascist Forge' - an online neo-Nazi forum where terrorism and sexual violence were openly encouraged.

BBC Panorama also investigated Fascist Forge, exposing its founder as a 25-year-old man from California.

Vaughan uploaded self-made propaganda images to the website promoting the now-banned terrorist organisation Sonnenkrieg Division.

A chat thread containing the propaganda included responses from two users central to a later terrorist attack plot: a 16 year-old boy from Durham, who last year became the youngest person ever convicted of such an offence in the UK, and an American who sought to supply the boy with a dangerous bomb-making chemical, whom Panorama identified as an even younger teenager from Connecticut.

The court heard he had earlier applied to join another British group - System Resistance Network - since outlawed as an alias of the neo-Nazi terror group National Action.

His application had vowed he would do anything if he "thought it essential to the cause" and was accompanied by a poster saying 'Muslims Beware - Generation of Revenge - Islam Free Zone'.

Notes and search terms found on Vaughan's devices included "where to cut to get most blood" and "annihilate females".

Officers found a list of 129 internet accounts, usernames and passwords on a memory stick in his bedroom, and a large volume of extremist material totalling about 4,200 images and 302 media files.

Upon his arrest last summer, Vaughan asked detectives: "Have you got the others?"

But he refused to answer questions during police interviews and it is still unclear how he first became radicalised.

Police were unable to recover information relating to many of his earlier online activities due to Vaughan resetting his computer.

One document he created in 2018 included an address for an online alias - LionAW - associated with the American militant organisation Atomwaffen Division.

In mitigation, Naeem Mian QC said the defendant "intimates he was groomed" and "knows what he did was wrong".

He said an expert report suggested that Vaughan was on the "autistic spectrum".

The terror offences admitted by Vaughan were 12 counts of possessing documents useful to a terrorist, one count of encouraging terrorism, and one of disseminating terrorist publications.

The indecent images offences relate to two videos showing young boys being raped.

Vaughan will be sentenced on 23 October.