Teenagers ‘planned Columbine-style killing spree’
Loners Matthew Swift, 18, and Ross McKnight, 16, spent more than a year making elaborate plans to bomb Crown Point North shopping centre and Audenshaw High School, Manchester Crown Court heard.
The pair named their alleged plot Project Rainbow, wrote down 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, 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 on the same street in Denton, Greater Manchester, intended to carry out the massacre on the 10th 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 a high school in Columbine, Colorado, US, on April 20, 1999.
They wounded 21 others before committing suicide.
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 fantasies into reality.”
McKnight, a would-be Olympic weightlifter, still attended the school at the time of the plot and Swift, an ex-pupil, worked at Ikea in Ashton-under-Lyne.
McKnight even wrote about the “Audenshaw massacre” in an essay entitled Equations of the Mind, which earned him a grade C mark and a teacher’s compliment that it was “interesting and unusual”, Wright said.
He said the pair were also fascinated by the Oklahoma bombings, carried out by Timothy McVeigh on April 19 1995, which resulted in the deaths of 168 people.
Swift was 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.
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” and CCTV images of the pair.
Swift’s 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. Both atrocities occurred in 2007.
Swift also 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.”
A trip to the cinema put Project Rainbow on hold for a short time, the jury heard. Mr Wright said the pair temporarily shelved their plans after watching Into The Wild, directed by Sean Penn, which tells the story of an athlete who renounces materialism and goes to Alaska to live in harmony with nature.
The pair wanted to raise cash and go to Alaska, the jury heard.
But Swift later wrote of his “deep desire to take human life away, it’s becoming an obsession” and the plan was resumed.
Their 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 Mr Wright: “I did believe what he was saying just by the way he was saying it.”
Describing McKnight as friendless, she said he disliked materialism: “He didn’t agree with how society was. He didn’t like the way people lived.”
She told her mother the following day and the matter was reported to the police, the jury heard.
After their arrest police recovered clothing they planned to wear on the day, including gas masks and white-out contact lenses.
Other items included The Anarchists Cookbook, which contained instructions on ingredients to use in explosives, and floorplans of the school.
When police recovered Swift’s mobile phone, they found eight video clips of their experiments with explosive devices.
The trial resumes at 10.30am today.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
