BNP activist on firearms charges

A British National Party (BNP) activist has appeared in court on firearms charges.

Police officers were posted outside the magistrates courts building in Bury St Edmunds on Friday when 50-year-old David Lucas made a brief appearance to face two charges of possession of a signal launcher gun without a certificate and possession of ammunition for a firearm without a certificate.

Lucas, of South Road, Lakenheath, did not enter pleas and the case was adjourned until December 17 when he is due to be committed for trial at Ipswich Crown Court.

A former member of Lakenheath Parish Council, he stepped down from his role in July. He also stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the BNP in last year’s European elections. Lucas was released on conditional bail until the next hearing and his passport must remain surrendered.

He was originally arrested in August when tactical firearms officers were involved in a search of a caravan in Blackdyke Road, Hockwold. Speaking at the time a police spokeswoman said: “Officers from the tactical firearms unit were involved but for their skills in gaining entry to properties and searching rather than firearms deployment.”

Newmarket Journal

BNP farmer faces weapons and explosives charges

A British National Party activist and Suffolk farmer has appeared in court this morning charged with a number of explosives and firearms offences.

David Lucas of South Road, Lakenheath stood before magistrates in Bury St Edmunds this morning facing seven counts relating to the possession of explosives and firearms. The Lakenheath parish councillor appeared in the dock in a dark suit with a blue tie loosened at the neck and spoke only to confirm his name and address.

The clerk of the court read out to him the seven offences he is charged with, which relate to April this year. They are; possessing an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose, possessing a prohibited firearm, possession of ammunition with intent to endanger life, possessing prohibited ammunition, possessing expanding ammunition derived from the military and possessing ammunition for a firearm without a certificate under two offences.

The charge of possession of explosives under suspicious circumstances can only be brought by police with the authorisation of the Attorney General and carries a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment.

The Chairman of the Bench, Lorraine Line, told Lucas: “The offences you are charged with can only be heard at a crown court.”

She said he will be given an opportunity to enter a plea to the charges at a hearing at Ipswich Crown Court on January 22. As part of his bail arrangements he was told he must not leave the UK, or take steps to leave, and his passport must remain surrendered to the police.

Evening Star

BNP activist charged with explosives and firearms offences

David Lucas, leading BNP activist and all-round nutjob

A leading British National Party activist and Suffolk farmer has been charged by police with a number of explosives and firearms offences.

David Lucas, 49, who once caused controversy for building gallows and selling them to African countries with poor human rights records, was charged yesterdayfollowing his arrest in April. Lucas, of South Road in Lakenheath, stood as one of the eastern region British National Party (BNP) candidates for the European elections in June. He is also a Lakenheath parish councillor.

He has been charged with possession of explosives under suspicious circumstances, possession of an explosives substance without an explosives licence, possession of a prohibited weapon, possession of ammunition with intent to endanger life, possession of ammunition without a firearms certificate and two counts of possession of prohibited ammunition. The charge of possession of explosives under suspicious circumstances can only be brought by police with the authorisation of the Attorney General.

But last night the BNP accused Suffolk Constabulary of persecuting Lucas because he stood for the far-right party. Simon Darby, the deputy leader of the BNP, said Lucas' “troubles” started after he was announced as a candidate for the European election.

“I think the police have got it in for him,” he said. “I would imagine that it is to do with his capacity as an agricultural rural chap. It is just one of the many things that ordinary rural people have to deal with when you have got a politically motivated police force. Obviously if he needs help we will give him that but we will have to see how it pans out. He had a very successful business there and a big market on his farm so he is very well thought of in the area.”

Lucas caused controversy in 2006 when it emerged he was building gallows for export. The execution equipment he sold ranged from single gallows, at about £12,000 each, to “Multi-hanging Execution Systems” mounted on lorry trailers, costing about £100,000. He also allowed the BNP's eastern region to use his barns for a local 'Battle for Britain' fundraising event in the run-up to the European elections.

Last night, David Gathercole, chairman of Lakenheath Parish Council, said he could not comment on the charges against Lucas. But he said: “Unless he is found guilty, he is still an innocent man and can still sit on the parish council.”

Lucas is due before West Suffolk Magistrates' Court in Bury St Edmunds on November 10.

EADT24

Mad or bad? Steve Fyfe: BNP candidate and obsessive gunman

BNP candidate and Rambo wannabe Steve Fyfe

A man who regularly stands in elections for the British National Party has boasted about his disregard for “rules and regulations” controlling the use of firearms in the UK.

Steve Fyfe is standing in a council by-election on 26 March, his fourth attempt to get elected to North East Lincolnshire Council. He also contested the last general election for the BNP in Grimsby, where he lives, and was third on the BNP’s list of candidates for Lothian region in the election for the Scottish Parliament in 2007, when the party rounded up anyone in the UK with a Scottish-sounding name to stand, in the absence of more than a handful of supporters in Scotland itself.

Clearly a valued activist, the 34-year-old is also the BNP’s Grimsby organiser and has been a BNP member for seven years. But his numerous postings on internet forums also reveal an unhealthy obsession with guns and contain hints that not everything he owns is legal.

After the Dunblane massacre in 1996, firearms legislation in the UK was tightened up and no member of the public can now own handguns or ammunition for them. Fyfe claims to have a shotgun licence, which enables him to own shotguns with a magazine capacity of no more than two shots. He also says he received a firearms certificate in March 2006, which permits him to own rifles, shotguns with a magazine capacity greater than two and certain types of airguns. He claims to own around £6,000 worth of legally held weapons and to be secretary of a gun club.

A firearms certificate is only granted to people whom the police consider fit to be entrusted with firearms without danger to public safety or to the peace. They must have a record of active membership of a target shooting club or permission to shoot over land.

The certificate imposes severe restrictions on the use of the weapons. In particular a certificate holder cannot permit other people to handle the guns unless they have their own certificate to cover them.

Yet on 11 August 2008 Fyfe, posting as sidneysausage, wrote on a gun trading forum: “However, I don’t do rules and regulations if there is absolutely no point in it whatsoever. If some of my friends want to ‘have a go’ they will bloody well ‘have a go’. Personally, I'll take my friends out to the field where I shoot, somwhere [sic] out of view, with a nice, big backstop, up to 300m away and they can use as many rounds as they care to fire. Who the hell are the police to suggest they might know my friend I’ve known for more than fifteen years better than me?”

On the same day he also boasted: “I have a Long Barrel Revolver”. On 9 January this year he declared: “I'd still prefer my .44 LBR and be able to use cartridges with my nitro”.

Fyfe, who works as a chemical process supervisor in the chemical industry, also has an interest in explosives and their illegal use. On 27 May 2008 he wrote: “I’ve a big box of fireworks in my attic, just waiting for the day when some muslim extremists fly a plane into westminster”.

While it is not surprising that Fyfe’s obsessions and desires do not make him unsuitable to be a BNP candidate, the same cannot be said about his membership of the Territorial Army, in which he serves with the 3rd Royal Anglian Regiment. His postings contain hints that he might be abstracting items from his TA unit. For example on 21 July 2007 he wrote: “The new 30 round H&K mags for the SA80 work really nice in mine. I have ‘aquired’ [sic] one or two. However, if you aren’t in the TA/Army/Navy/Air Force, you can find one or two floating round on ebay.”

Fyfe claims to like extreme and outdoor sports. One of them appears to be driving at dangerous speeds. A long post in January 2006 described how he was caught driving his Subaru Impreza at over 140 miles per hour. Concerned that a conviction and almost certain driving ban would cost him his firearms and shotgun certificates, he said he was hiring Nick Freeman, the specialist motoring lawyer known as Mr Loophole, to get him off.

It is unclear whether Fyfe is a fantasist or whether he really owns restricted weapons and breaks the terms of his firearms certificate. Either way, he is clearly unsuitable for service in the Territorial Army or to be in possession of any lethal weapon.

He may see himself as a Rambo figure, but the reality is different. Writing on 21 November last year about British forces serving in Iraq he explained: “I described the chaps who went as ‘silly Bastards’ because they did not go out of any sense of justice, belief, national pride, or even camaraderie”.

Grimsby’s terrorist line-up

Grimsby has been the home of a number of nazis with a interest in terrorism and weapons.

Back in the 1960s, Donald Mudie, a crank member of Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement (NSM), used to hold court at his Grimsby home for people who shared his political views. In the 1970s Mudie, a former newspaper journalist, was one of two security guards at a camp held by the elite nazi League of St George on Mersea Island in Essex. Mudie patrolled the site with a loaded shotgun.

Fast forward to 2002 and Cameron Duncan, a supporter of the British National Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Duncan was caught and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, after a man in the USA with whom he was exchanging emails turned out to be an FBI agent. Duncan had been asking him to obtain firearms and explosives. The agent had infiltrated the KKK for the purpose of catching such dangerous men as Duncan.
Moving inland up the River Humber, we find Martyn Gilleard from Goole, the local branch organiser of the nazi British People’s Party.

Goole, who also had links with the BNP in Scotland, was found in possession of an array of knives, guns, machetes, swords, axes, ammunition and four nail bombs, together with internet instructions for making poison and bombs and significant amounts of racist literature from far-right parties.

The police were surprised to find all this terrorist material when they raided his flat in October 2007 on a tip-off about child pornography. The 39,000 indecent images of children that they also found, some very nasty, did not endear him to the court and he received a total sentence of 16 years in prison.

In December last year Nathan Worrell was jailed for more than seven years after being found guilty of possessing material for terrorist purposes and racially aggravated harassment. Police had found manuals and a video explaining how to make bombs and detonators using household materials at his flat in Grimsby as well as two tubs of weedkiller, three bottles of lighter fluid and fireworks, some of which had been tampered with.

They also found a lot of racist and far-right propaganda, including BNP material and membership cards for other extreme groups.

It would appear that nazis with an interest in terror, violence and firearms are a familiar sight in this part of Britain. The good thing is that the police appear to be keeping track of them, so it's surprising that Steve Fyfe has so far slipped through the net.

Hope not hate

BNP leak suspect stood in Basildon election

A man who has been arrested on suspicion of leaking details of thousands of British National Party members comes from south Essex.

Matthew Single, 36, who has twice stood for Basildon Council on behalf of the British National Party, was one of two people arrested in connection with the release last month of a confidential list containing details of more than 10,000 party members. The list contained names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of members, and in some instances even their ages, hobbies and professions. Police were forced to warn vigilantes not to take the law into their hands and attack known members following its publication.

Single, who previously lived in Tallow Gate, South Woodham Ferrers, and his girlfriend, Sadie Graham, have since been released on bail without charge by Dyfed Powys Police, in West Wales, pending further investigation.

Police spokeswoman Sian George said: “Dyfed Powys Police can confirm that two people have been interviewed, in conjunction with alleged criminal offences under the Data Protection Act, relating to the complaint from the BNP about the release of their party membership list. The two people were arrested in the Nottinghamshire area on Thursday evening.”

The Echo revealed a year ago that Single, now of Brinsley, Nottinghamshire, had been recruited as one of BNP boss Nick Griffin’s top security men. However, he has since been sacked from the party alongside girlfriend Miss Graham, a councillor in Broxtowe, Nottinghamshire, with whom he has been living.

Len Heather, BNP organisor for Basildon, Billericay, and Wickford, said: “We believe the Labour Party was ultimately behind all of this, along with the left wing unions, who are dedicated to undermining us.”

Single was arrested earlier this year following an armed police search at the home of his Miss Graham, in Brinsley. Officers, who were searching for firearms following a tip-off, seized a canister thought to contain a noxious substance, plus radios, body armour vests, scanners and other equipment. Single was sentenced, at Nottingham Crown Court in May this year, to 12 months community service for possession of a weapon for the discharge of noxious liquid.

Essex Echo

More chaos as the BNP's Dirty Tricks Dept goes out of control

As incredible as it may seem, the BNP seems to be encouraging more havoc to break out just as the furore of the past couple of weeks seems to be dying down. As everyone concentrates their attention on Christmas rather than the chaos in the party, Nick Griffin, never the most subtle person on the planet, tweaks the situation by ensuring that those who heckled him during the recent Leeds meeting are expelled from the party over this weekend, thus pretty much ensuring that things will liven up again and making damn sure that the BNP's Leeds contingent will be forever alienated from the party's current leadership.

Now it emerges that someone in the party has been feeding misleading information to the police in an attempt to discredit one of the original four who were kicked out, Sadie Graham's partner and former BNP security deputy Matt Single.

Over the past few days we've seen a number of extraordinary documents displayed on the BNP website - receipts, Word documents, emails and screen captures - all with the intention of convincing unbelievers that the four original rebels were thieves, liars and plotters. Mixed in with all this nonsense were accusations that the dissidents were all 'Reds', neo-nazis and/or Searchlight moles.

All these accusations seem to have stemmed from the higher reaches of the BNP hierarchy - perhaps directly from Griffin himself. Party members who have been around for a few years remember Griffin's lies about the party's founder and previous leader John Tyndall, then the energetic and ruthless purging of Tyndall-supporters left in the party after his takeover - all of them thrown out surrounded by accusations similar to those encountered by the current band of malcontents.

It's hard to remember that it's barely two weeks since the revelations about Sadie Graham, Matt Single, Kenny and Nicholla Smith broke but that two weeks has been fraught with accusation/counter-accusation, revelations of evidence-rigging, bugging and illegal entry, a constant stream of members resigning from party positions and threats of violence and mayhem against the person at the centre of all the recent acrimony in the party, nazi-sympathiser Mark Collett.

But now there is a new revelation and it could be one too far for those members who have been wondering if Nick Griffin's paranoia and desperate grip on power are getting out of hand.

Matt Single, posting on the dissident Enough is Enough blog, has revealed that the home he shares with his partner, the heavily-pregnant Sadie Graham, was raided by police a few days ago and thoroughly searched after someone had suggested that he had a firearm in his possession

'It transpired that the police had received, very recently, from two corroborating informants that I had an illegal firearm in my possession, and that they would be now carrying out a thorough search of the house, all outbuildings and vehicles...it is my belief that whoever had contacted the police had set us up and had a clear and obvious objective; they wanted Sadie and myself as much to experience as much torment and humiliation as possible. Whoever it was has a good knowledge of the law and knew exactly what to say to the police in order to manipulate them into raiding our home. They knew they needed two or more people to substantiate such a claim to lead to a raid and so they would have needed to have used someone else to help them. It would clearly be a person that would know I would have quantities of security training equipment kept at home and I could therefore possibly fall foul of an overlooked law if I were raided by the police that would obviously scrutinise all my equipment.'

Some people in the BNP, already speculating over at the Stormfront nazi forum over who is responsible for this, have suggested Griffin's relatively new and South African-run BNP Intelligence Dept, more commonly known as the Dirty Tricks Dept, but Matt Single seems sure that the responsibility rests with only one person, Nick Griffin. He continues;

'It has come to pass that for years you have bullied, lied to and intimidated people into getting what you want for yourself. You have used tactics including character assassinations, lies and slander to rid yourself of your internal political critics, and those that offer any future threat to your position. This is the reason why you have actively sought to surround yourself with weak-willed sycophants and people who you can easily control and offer no threat to you whatsoever; people like John Walker, Dave Hannam and Mark Collett, even psychologically disturbed characters such as Lee Barnes.'

Whatever else emerges from this debacle, Griffin's position has been severely weakened since all this started. The illegal entry and possible bugging disturbed many prominent members so much that they resigned in sympathy, the release of personal emails on the BNP's own website seemed only to build on this sympathy for the rebels, but this direct attempt to get the police involved will be seen as well beyond any kind of legitimate political attack and will turn the average BNP member against those who are perceived to have organised it. From what we can see from our regular scourings of the far-right sites, the members are sick of all the accusations flying about - in fact one of Stormfront's more pithy contributors put it in a nutshell when responding to a comment that the whole thing smelled very fishy, by saying 'It's all those red herrings the BNP is trailing around'.

We couldn't have put it better ourselves.