A 16-year-old boy was arrested for terrorist offenses while trying to board a flight from Stansted Airport on Monday.
He was suspected of gathering information that could be useful to a person committing or preparing a terrorist act and disseminating terrorist publications. Police said the alleged crimes were linked to an extreme Islamist ideology.
Officers searched an address in East London in connection with the boy’s arrest.
The teenager was arrested by officers from the Stansted Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command (MCTC) after a Schedule 7 stop that police could use to stop, interrogate, search and detain people traveling across the UK to determine whether they are involved in terrorism.
He was arrested less than a week after a 15-year-old boy from West Yorkshire was arrested for alleged terrorism crimes.
Northeast Terrorism Police say they arrested a teenager from Haworth on June 21 as part of an operation aimed at alleged far-right terrorism.
The boy was charged Tuesday with one count of involvement in the preparation of a terrorist act, four counts of distributing terrorist publications and one charge of the Anti-Harassment Act.
He has been remanded in custody and is due to appear at Old Bailey on Friday, July 15.
Official figures show that people under the age of 18 accounted for 15% of all terrorism arrests in the UK (excluding Northern Ireland) in the last financial year. That had risen 12 percent in the previous year, but counterterrorism police said the proportional increase was due to a drop in the number of elderly people arrested.
In May, a 13-year-old boy became one of the youngest people ever arrested for terrorist crimes in Britain.
At the time, Commander Richard Smith, head of the MCTC, said: “Although it is still very rare for such a young person to be arrested for a terrorist offense, we have recently seen an alarming increase in the number of teenagers involved in terrorism.”
In the year to March 31, there were 196 arrests for terrorist activity in Britain, which is 16 percent more than the previous year. So far, less than a third of the arrests (59) have led to charges.
By the end of March, there were 233 people in custody in the UK for terrorism-related crimes. Of these, 68 percent are determined to support extreme Islamist views, while 24 percent are far-right. The remaining 6% of detainees are registered as holding “other ideologies”.
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