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Britain's youngest terrorist and leader of neo-Nazi cell avoids custody with rehabilitation order

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The country's youngest convicted terrorist, who led a neo-Nazi cell from his grandmother's house, has avoided custody.

He was 13 when he obtained instructions for explosives, and a year later had collected a haul of terror material and was sharing far-right ideology in chartrooms.

An Old Bailey judge today gave the teenager - now 16 - a two-year youth rehabilitation order.

The defendant, from southeast Cornwall, had pleaded guilty to 10 counts of possessing terrorist material and two of disseminating terror documents.

Judge Mark Dennis QC told the boy, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, that he had entered an "online world of wicked prejudice".

He said a custodial sentence would undo the work under way to rehabilitate him, but warned that any reoffending would mean an "spiral of ever-lengthening terms of incarceration".