A British court has jailed former army chef Mark Broadhurst, 28, for nearly four years for possessing weapons for ‘terrorist purposes’. The sentence was passed on Wednesday at Sheffield Crown Court in England.
The case followed by two years a police investigation that uncovered online messages in which Broadhurst voiced racist views and said he intended to sell homemade firearms to right-wing groups.
Weapons stockpile found at his home
When officers took Broadhurst into custody in September 2024, they discovered a large cache at his home. It included knives, crossbows, black powder, ammunition, air pistols and what officials described as ‘an improvised homemade cannon’.
Broadhurst was also part of an online chat group with three other men. Those men were jailed last year for planning a ‘terrorist’ attack on mosques or synagogues, which they believed would form part of a coming ‘race war’.
Prosecutors and police describe his mindset
Frank Ferguson, head of the special crime division at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said Broadhurst was ‘clearly interested in violence and developing weapons that had the ability to cause untold harm to innocent people’.
Detective Chief Superintendent James Dunkerley, who leads counterterror policing in the northeastern region, said Broadhurst held an ‘extreme right-wing mindset’ and was ‘proactively ordering components to make explosives’.
Broadhurst pleaded guilty to firearm possession and to possessing an explosive under suspicious circumstances, but he denied the items were meant for terrorism. A judge nonetheless ruled that his offences were connected to ‘terrorism’.
Rising hate crime concerns across the UK
The conviction comes amid rising racial tensions and hate crimes in the UK, with marginalised communities increasingly targeted. In July, British police arrested 12 people over an ‘extreme right-wing terrorism threat’ aimed at an Islamic gathering in eastern England.
Six months before that, UK prosecutors said they were dealing with the largest number of hate crime cases police had ever referred to them.
