A woman who entered a 'Miss Hitler' beauty pageant has been jailed for three years for being a member of banned far-right neo-Nazi terrorist group National Action.
Alice Cutter, her ex partner Mark Jones, Garry Jack and Connor Scothern were convicted of membership of a terrorist group in March and were sentenced at Birmingham Crown Court yesterday (Tuesday).
Advert
Cutter, 23, was described by Judge Paul Farrer as a 'trusted confidante' of one of the group's leaders, though she 'never held an organisational or leadership role'.
Cutter, from Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax in West Yorkshire, denied being a member of the group, despite attending numerous rallies and entering the Miss Hitler beauty pageant under the name 'Miss Buchenwald', in reference to a Nazi concentration camp where more than 50,000 people died.
Jurors were also shown messages in which Cutter joked about gassing synagogues and using a Jew's head as a football. Former partner Jones also admitted to holding a National Action flag and doing a Nazi salute in Buchenwald's execution room in Germany in 2016.
Advert
Cutter was jailed for three years and Jones, also from Sowerby Bridge, for five and a half years, while Jack, 24, was sentenced to four and a half years and Scothern, 19, was detained for 18 months. They were told they will have to serve at least two thirds of their sentence before they can apply for parole.
Max Hill QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said: "They hark back to the days of not just anti-Semitism but the Holocaust, the Third Reich in Germany, and they take their mindset from those extreme Nazi groups and latterly neo-Nazi groups in Germany."
National Action was founded in 2013 but was outlawed three years later after it celebrated the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox - making it the first organisation to be banned by the Government since World War II.
Advert
Head of West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit (WMCTU), Detective Chief Superintendent Kenny Bell, said: "We have seen a significant increase of right-wing referrals to our Prevent programme and we will investigate the threat as robustly as we would any other terrorist group, as well as training our officers on the signs to look out for and working with communities to increase awareness.
"Terrorists and extremists use this kind of ideology to create discord, distrust and fear among our communities and we strive to counter this. I would encourage people to report hate crime to us and it will be taken seriously."
Featured Image Credit: West Midlands Police