He is likely to be released in only six years, in 2022. What will be done between now and 2022 to disabuse him of his jihadi beliefs? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. Any endeavor of that kind would be “Islamophobic.” Sevdet Besim is likely to come out of prison even more fanatically committed to jihad than he was when he was plotting to behead a police officer.
“Sevdet Besim, 19, gets 10 years’ jail for plot to behead police officer,” by Neelima Choahan, Adam Cooper and Nick Miller, The Age, September 5, 2016 (thanks to Graeme):
An Australian teenager who admitted plotting to behead a police officer during the 2015 Anzac Day parade has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Sevdet Ramadan Besim, 19, had pleaded guilty to planning a terrorist act.
In the Victorian Supreme Court, Justice Michael Croucher said he was not fully satisfied the teenager had renounced radical beliefs, but had shown some prospects of rehabilitation.
Justice Croucher said that had Besim not pleaded guilty, he would have sentenced him to 15 years.
He said the teenager had also shown respect to the court, and had the support of a tight-knit family.
Justice Croucher set a non-parole period of 7½ years. Besim is deemed to have already served 507 days in custody. That time will be included in his sentence, so he could be released some time in 2022.
Besim was clean shaven and dressed in a dark suit for his court appearance. His family and friends called out “love you” and “see you soon” from the public gallery as Besim left the court.
Besim blew then a kiss as he was escorted away by police.
Justice Croucher said Besim’s plans to kill a law enforcement officer by “deliberating crashing into him with a car and then to behead him” was “unfathomable” to the vast majority of the community.
He told the court that Besim had wanted to commit the “putrid act” in name of violent jihad to, in Besim’s words “make sure the dogs remember this as well as their fallen heroes”.
Besim was communicating with another young would-be terrorist in the United Kingdom, sending him messages from his bedroom in his parents’ house in Hallam on what he thought was a secure telegram messaging device.
Justice Croucher said they discussed the different ways in which the “unspeakable crime” might be committed as if talking about “football tactics”.
Justice Croucher said Besim’s mind had been “corrupted” by “lunatic clerics”. He was also influenced by the death of his friend Numan Haider who was shot dead by police in 2014 after he stabbed them outside the Endeavour Hills police station….
Police say that on March 17, 2015, Besim told the boy: “all I wanna say is that insha’Allah im ready to fight these dogs on there doorstep.
“I’d love to take out some cops,” Besim said, according to court documents.
“I was gonna meet with them then take some heads ahaha.
“The more equipment im provided with the better but ill still go with jst a knife in my hand. I want to be among those Allah laughs at …”
Besim pleaded guilty in June to one count of doing an act in preparation or planning for a terrorist act, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Besim, from Hallam, has been in custody since April 18 last year, when 200 heavily armed officers swooped on the city’s south-east, arresting five teenagers and seizing knives and swords.
In near-simultaneous raids in the near-west of England the 14-year-old was also arrested,
Further details of the Anzac Day plot were revealed at Manchester Crown Court in England where the boy was on trial last year.
The teenager, from Blackburn, in Lancashire, was sentenced to life in jail, with a minimum, five-year term.
The court heard that he was in contact with an Australian IS propagandist and recruiter “Abu Kambozz”, also known as al-Cambodi who at the time was operating out of Raqqa in Syria.
Al-Cambodi told the boy about a “brother in Australia who wished to carry out a terrorist attack but needed a guide or mentor”, the court heard.
The boy volunteered to act as this man’s guide. The man, who appears in evidence tendered to the court under the pseudonym “Illyas”, was identified as Sevdet Besim.
At an earlier hearing, it was revealed that Besim had drafted a martyrdom note for his family in the hours before his arrest….