A British court has sentenced Mark Broadhurst, a 28 year old former British Army chef, to nearly four years in prison after ruling that his possession of a weapons stockpile was connected to terrorism. He was sentenced on Wednesday at Sheffield Crown Court in England.
The sentencing came two years after police uncovered online messages in which Broadhurst expressed racist views and set out an intention to sell homemade firearms to right-wing groups.
When officers took him into custody in September 2024, they found a stockpile at his home address. The items included knives and crossbows, black powder, ammunition, air pistols and what officials described as ‘an improvised homemade cannon’.
Broadhurst, a former British Army member, was also part of an online chat group with three other men. Those men were jailed last year for planning to carry out a ‘terrorist’ attack at mosques or synagogues as part of what they believed was a coming ‘race war’.
Frank Ferguson, head of the special crime division at the UK’s public prosecution agency, 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 heads ‘counterterror’ policing in the northeastern region, said Broadhurst had been found to harbour 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. He denied that the offences were for ‘terrorism’ purposes, but a judge ruled that they were connected to ‘terrorism’.
The conviction comes against a backdrop of rising racial tensions and hate crimes in the UK, with marginalised communities increasingly targeted.
In July, British police arrested 12 people in connection with an ‘extreme right-wing terrorism threat’ targeting an Islamic gathering in eastern England.
Six months earlier, UK prosecutors said they were handling the highest number of hate crime cases referred by police in its history.
Broadhurst, 28, received a jail term of nearly four years after pleading guilty to firearm possession and possessing an explosive under suspicious circumstances. A judge concluded that the offences were connected to ‘terrorism’, despite Broadhurst’s denial that they were for ‘terrorism’ purposes.
