White supremacist schoolboy given Hitler's Mein Kampf for Christmas at age 10

04 November 2023 , 12:48

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Malakai Wheeler, 18, from Swindon, Wiltshire, who was convicted at Winchester Crown Court of six charges, including possessing copies of the Terrorist Handbook. (Image: PA)

A schoolboy racist who shared bomb guides online was inspired by reading a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf he was given as a child for Christmas, a court has heard.

Malakai Wheeler was just 15 when he began sharing terrorist material about explosives and firearms with an online group of white nationalists. His aim was to encourage a terrorist attack. When police arrested him he told them he had started reading Hitler's manifesto when he was 10 after receiving it as a festive gift. He had not thumbed it "cover to cover” but on “different occasions” had read the section about race.

The grammar school student and right-wing extremist, now aged 18, has been jailed for six years. He was described as a “deeply entrenched racist and white supremacist” by the judge who sentenced him for terrorism offences.

Items inside a 'survival kit' in a shoe box of Malakai Wheeler, jailed for white supremacist behaviour (Solent News & Photo Agency)

The teen started to show his support for extreme right-wing causes while still a pupil at Marling School in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Jurors heard he would doodle swastikas on his school books, was caught doing a Nazi salute, and had a video of the 2019 Christchurch shootings on his phone overdubbed with Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”.

Police searched his home and found publications titled the Terrorist Handbook, the Anarchist Cookbook and Homemade Detonators. Wheeler later claimed that another book, Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction, had been given to him by his stepmother. Winchester Crown Court heard Wheeler was part of a group whose “self-professed purpose” was to provide a place for “white nationalists’”, reports the Telegraph.

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The teenager, who denied all charges, was convicted in September of six counts of being in possession of, and sharing, terrorism documents. He was jailed for six years and branded “cold and calculating” by a judge. He will serve an extra 12 months on licence, meaning his total extended sentence is seven years.

Malakai Wheeler at Winchester Crown Court. The teenage schoolboy has been jailed for sharing bomb guides online (Solent News & Photo Agency)

Judge Jane Miller KC said Wheeler had “clearly become deeply interested in Right-wing socialism and Nazism and all of its connotations". "You were given Mein Kampf, you said, and started reading it from age 10 or 11," he said. “You said you are not a racist or white supremacist and did not endorse the group and that you were going through the motions. In reality you are a deeply entrenched racist and white supremacist with an extreme Right-wing mindset with a sinister interest in violence and insurrection.”

Paul Greaves