Pair plotted bloodbath worse than Columbine, court hears

Published on Wednesday 2 September 2009 22:02

A PAIR of disaffected teenagers inspired by the Columbine High School massacre planned a copycat killing spree in Manchester, a court has been told.

Loners Matthew Swift, 18, and Ross McKnight, 16, spent more than a year making elaborate plans to bomb the Crown Point North shopping centre and Audenshaw High School, Manchester Crown Court heard.

The pair named their alleged plot Project Rainbow, wrote their plans in diaries and used a mobile phone to record their experiments with explosives.

McKnight's diary referred to the "greatest massacre ever" and killing thousands of people, prosecutor Peter Wright, QC, told the jury.

Reading from the diary, Mr Wright said: "We will walk into school and at the end of it no-one will walk out alive… after we have finished in Audenshaw, we will have to kill ourselves there and then."

The pair, who lived in the same street in Denton, Lancashire, intended to carry out the attacks on the tenth anniversary of the Columbine massacre, the jury of seven women and five men heard.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher when they opened fire at Columbine High School in the US state of Colorado on 20 April, 1999.

They also wounded 21 others, before killing themselves.

Mr Wright said: "It is the prosecution case that these two young men sat in the dock had planned to copy and emulate the actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, here in the UK.

"They had discussed, they had fantasised and eventually they had agreed to convert their fantasises into reality," Mr Wright told the court.

He said the pair were also fascinated by the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, carried out by Timothy McVeigh, which killed 168 people.

The court heard McKnight, a would-be Olympic weightlifter, still attended the school at the time of the plot, while Swift, a former pupil, worked at a local Ikea store.

Swift had been given an exclusion order banning him from the Crown Point shopping centre in September 2007 – which sparked his resentment towards the place, the jury was told.

The jury was told Swift wrote in a notepad: "Audenshaw High will be no more because, unlike Columbine, my pipe bombs will actually f****** explode, and I will walk from classroom to classroom killing the f*** out of everybody, then maybe people will learn."

Further entries included "Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold will rise again".

The notepad also contained photos of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, who shot eight people dead at a school in Finland, and Seung-Hui Cho, who shot 32 people dead at the Virginia Tech campus in the US. Both atrocities were carried out in 2007.

Swift wrote: "I do not consider myself to be normal, come to think of it I do not think of myself as human. I am supreme, superior, and I will expose the truth. I will die for what I believe. I will complete Project Rainbow, I will show no mercy… I will make history."

Swift later wrote of his "deep desire to take human life away, it's becoming an obsession".

The alleged plot was revealed after McKnight made a drunken phone call to a girl he liked in March this year – three days after a massacre at a school in Winnenden, Germany, when Tim Kretschmer, 17, killed 15 people. The girl, who cannot be named, told the jury that McKnight was drunk and claimed his drink had been spiked with cocaine before revealing his plans.

She told her mother the following day, and the matter was reported to the police.

In police interviews, McKnight refused to comment and Swift told officers that "he was a confused teenager with a vivid imagination".

Both defendants plead not guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause explosions.

The trial continues.