A jury at Birmingham crown court on Monday convicted a neo-Nazi couple of being members of a terrorist group, the extremely right-wing National Action after it had been banned in 2016, according to The Guardian.
Adam Thomas and Claudia Patatas were found guilty of being members of the outlawed group by a British court after the two named their infant son after Adolf Hitler out of "admiration" for the Nazi leader.
The jury heard testimony about the decision along with photographs from the couple's home which showed Thomas holding his son while wearing the hooded white robes of a Ku Klux Klansman, a hate group originally from the United States.
Thomas, 22, a former Amazon security guard from Erdington in Birmingham, and Patatas, 36, a photographer originally from Portugal, were found guilty after a seven-week trial detailed their behavior.
Daniel Bogunovic of Leicester was a third defendant in the case and was also convicted of being a member of National Action and was one of the leaders in the organization's Midlands chapter.
Bugonovic was already convicted earlier this year of "stirring up racial hatred" after a group he was a part of put up racist stickers at Aston University's campus in Birmingham.
Thomas was also convicted of owning the Anarchist's Cookbook, a terrorist manual which contains detailed instructions on how to make viable bombs.
National Action was banned by the British government in December 2016 after the group "rebranded."
The jury saw numerous forms of evidence, including social media chats where the three discussed what prosecutors claimed were plans to continue operating National Action by "shedding one skin for another," by running the banned group under a different name.
Three other men involved in the group who were scheduled to stand trial along with Thomas, Bugonovic, and Patatas admitted to belonging to the banned organization before the trial began, including Darren Fletcher, 28, Joel Wilmore, 24, and Nathan Pryke, 26.
DCS Matt Wart of the West Midlands counterterrorism unit said National Action members would try to hide their action by changing the name of the group but said the far-right was a growing threat within Britain, saying the problem won't just go away.
“The shared ideology of neo-Nazism exists across Europe,” he said.
Ward said there was no evidence the three convicted and three who pleaded guilty were plotting a potential attack.
The jury also heard evidence about how Thomas and Patatas put up stickers for the group in public locations after the ban.
Bugonovis also called for a "leadership" meeting in one of the chats including senior members in April 2017.
Thomas admitted he had a shaved head from the time he was a child and his stepfather was in the famous white power band Skrewdriver.
When his barrister Frida Hussain asked Thomas if he was racist, he admitted he was but said, “It is something I do not tend to think about anymore, something I want to put behind me.”
Thomas also said during his school years, a counter-radicalization program took him to meet with a female Holocaust survivor.
“She told me she was evacuated from Germany to Britain and I couldn’t see that as being a Holocaust survivor, at the time," Thomas said.
He also claimed the photograph of him wearing the KKK robes while holding his infant was "just play."
“They were not put up on some website or used to promote some agenda or ideology,” he said.
He also claimed the chats where he and other members made racist and anti-semitic remarks to one another online were "entertaining" and "funny, at the time."
When Hussain asked if his parents had been "extremists or racists," he admitted they were "common racists."
Thomas applied to join the army twice but was turned down due to an Asperger's diagnosis.
He said his beliefs in white nationalism began at an early age and contributed to his being expelled from mainstream school around the age of 14.
Thomas said his grandfather held a "positive view of Hitler and the Nazis" and would often perform Hitler salutes when Thomas would visit him in Derry, Northern Ireland.
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
Photo:
AP / West Midlands Police/PA Wire
