‘Middle-class’ neo-Nazi who encouraged another man to make a bomb after sharing a video of his Amazon Alexa speaker reading out a recipe for explosives is jailed for three years

• Middle-class Elliot Brown, 25, held views described by a judge as ‘utterly vile’
• He posted video to far-right chat group showing how to make explosive thermite
• Brown was jailed for three years for dissemination of terrorist material today 

A middle-class extremist has been jailed for encouraging another man to make a bomb by sharing a video in which he used his Amazon Alexa speaker to read out a recipe for explosives.

Elliot Brown, 25, held views described by a judge as ‘utterly vile’ when he posted a video to a far-right chat group showing how to make the pyrotechnic explosive thermite.

Naomi Parsons, prosecuting said Brown was ‘in his own words, a man from a middle-class background and well educated.’

He had been to a private school in Llanelli, South Wales and won a scholarship to an international school in Norway before studying politics and economics at Bath University.

Middle-class Elliot Brown (pictured), 25, held views described by a judge as ‘utterly vile’

Brown was jailed for three years for dissemination of terrorist material today in court

He dropped out of university during the pandemic and was working for a logistics company when he sent the video to a neo-Nazi chat group on Telegram on March 22 2020.

Police raided the home of Dean Morrice in Paulton, near Bristol on August 20 2020 and found enough aluminium powder, iron oxide, and magnesium ribbon in the kitchen to make 680g of thermite.

There was also enough carbon, potassium nitrate and sulphur, to make 1.3kg of gunpowder.

Morrice, who also had two 3-D printers and a digital recipe for making firearms, was later jailed for 18 years, after the court heard the 34-year-old father of four from Poulton, near Bath, was ‘clearly leading a double life.’

Brown dropped out of university during the pandemic and was working for a logistics company

Police found vile material in chat room

Police discovered that Brown had posted the video into a Telegram chat group called ‘Dart Heads’ which was said to be obsessed with ‘white genocide’ and the 14-word neo-Nazi slogan: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’

Brown had shared a copy of the audio book of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and posted on June 5 2020, a couple of weeks after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis: ‘It’s happening, the race war is here.’

A user called Mercian Heart, responded: ‘Our desires to go out and confront these servants of the Jews comes from our instinct to preserve our tribe and by extension the society around us.

‘Find men in your area, study 4th gen warfare. train, organize, gather supplies, build yourselves. The time for action will be upon us soon enough. Gods be praised!’

A 10-second video found on Brown’s phone showed him at a barbecue with some music in the back ground saying: ‘All I wanted to do is grill, but these Jews they leave me no choice but to kill.’

Also on his phone, police found a 30-minute clip of a livestream of a shooting at a synagogue in Halle, Germany on 9 October 2019 made by Stephan Balliet and a 48-second video, which started as a video game, but switched to clips from the livestream shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand by Brenton Tarrant.

An image on Brown’s phone showed a screenshot labelled: ‘Hail the saints! Never forget what they sacrificed for us’ with images of Anders Breivik – responsible for the mass murder of children in Norway in 2011, Dylan Roof – who shot black people in a church in the US – and Brenton Tarrant.

On one of his mobile phones, police found a 30-second video containing audio instructions on how to make thermite which had been recorded by Brown, at his home, using his Amazon Alexa, and shared on Telegram, three days before Morrice bought the chemicals.

Thermite was described as a mixture which burns at several thousand degrees Celsius to produce molten metal.

Brown was arrested in February 2021 and, in court, admitted to having ‘nationalist’ political views and to being ‘anti-Semitic, racist and a homophobe.’

A former air cadet, he said he was interested in militaria and survivalism and was a fan of Ray Mears and Bear Grylls.

Brown said he had joined the Conservative Party and UKIP before he became ‘a bit fed up with politics in the UK.’

The video was made as a ‘joke’ to impress the 14 others in the group because he had been watching an internet meme in which people asked Alexa to do unusual things, he said.

However, he told Bristol Crown Court he was now ‘ashamed, embarrassed and angry with myself’ for subscribing to those views and had become a Christian.

Ms Parsons told the jury: ‘Why not get Alexa to recite something else funny? The prosecution say that explosives were of interest to Mr Brown, and indeed to the others to whom he shared the video.’

Brown ‘intended or, at the very least, was reckless,’ that someone in the ‘Dart Heads’ Telegram group would be encouraged to commit a terrorist act.

‘In Mr Brown’s case, the proof is in the pudding. It must be an unfortunate coincidence that one of the recipients turned out to be the real deal, who purchased, within three days of the post, all the ingredients for thermite,’ Ms Parsons said.

Jailing him for three years and three months, for possession and dissemination of terrorist material, Judge Anthony Leonard KC, told him: ‘You were old enough and intelligent enough to know exactly what you were getting involved in.

‘You spoke about attacking racial and ethnic minorities and, as a group, you aspired to create a fascist state. The exchanges in which you took part were utterly vile.’

He and his friends on the Darts Head chat group shared a neo-Nazi ideology, seeking to promote hatred and racial supremacy, the judge said.

The effect of posting the video was ‘only too apparent’ because Morrice ‘immediately set about obtaining the igniter and ingredients for thermite,’ the judge added.

Detective Superintendent Craig McWhinnie, head of Counter-Terrorism Police South West said: ‘Elliot Brown was not just seeking to explore an interest in extremist related materials.

‘The video he produced and thought appropriate to share with people harbouring similar abhorrent views will understandably shock people.’

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