By Sammie Jones-
A police officer has been disgracefully convicted of being a member of a neo-Nazi terrorist group, three years after he was allowed to join the Metropolitan Police.
Benjamin Hannam became involved with National Action in 2016 and continued activities with a successor group after it was banned in December that year.
The 22-year-old is reportedly the first British police officer ever to be convicted of a terror offence.
He was found guilty of membership of a terrorist organisation following a trial that was subject to blanket reporting restrictions.
The 22-year-old was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury of being a member of National Action, a proscribed terrorist organisation, along with two counts of possessing documents useful for terrorism and for fraud.
After the police constable’s arrest in March last year, detectives found an image on his iPhone showing him in police uniform, with a Hitler-style moustache superimposed on his face and a Nazi badge on his lapel.
They also found he had downloaded a knife-fighting manual and a copy of the “manifesto” of the right-wing extremist Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people, mostly children, in bomb and gun attacks in Norway in 2011.
Prosecutors said the Breivik document included bomb-making instructions and “exhaustive justifications for his mass-casualty attacks”.
PC Hannam, who worked with the emergency response team in Haringey, north London, joined the Met in March 2018.
National Action was proscribed by the government as a terrorist group on 16 December 2016
The racist pervert also admitted possessing a prohibited image of a child.
Hannam, who denied that he had ever been a member of National Action, was found guilty of two counts of fraud for lying on police application and vetting forms.
The defendant from Edmonton, North London, was also convicted of two counts of possessing information useful to a terrorist over the 2011 Norway attacker’s manifesto and a “knife combat” document.
Prosecutor Dan Pawson-Pounds told the court Hannam demonstrated an “adherence to fascist ideology and a potentially veiled but nonetheless evident neo-Nazi mindset” in the period covered by the charges.
“Hannam continued to meet with like-minded individuals at what were clearly National Action events, well after the group had been proscribed,” he added.
“He had been a member, and active recruiter before proscription, and continued to be so afterwards, whilst taking precautions to move and conceal incriminating evidence.”
Hannam’s trial started on 8 March at the Old Bailey, but nothing could be published until the jury reached its verdict because of a reporting restrictions.
The restrictions were imposed because Hannam was due to face a second trial for possessing indecent images of children, and a judge did not want that jury to be affected by the terror trial.