2 weeks Ago By JOHN LEICESTER, Associated Press
PARIS — After his arrest, the boy’s mother was stunned to discover that her 12-year-old had been learning how to kill and gorging on videos of decapitation and torture so gruesome they made even case-hardened French court officials look away. The mother told criminal investigators that she’d thought her son had been playing video games and doing homework during the hours he spent in his room. The child’s descent into the internet’s darkest recesses started innocently enough, with online searches about Islam after an aunt gave him a Quran as a gift, the boy’s lawyer says.
From there, more searching, automated algorithms that steer users’ online experiences and the boy’s curiosity ultimately led him to encrypted chats and ultraviolent propaganda pumped out by Islamic State militants and other extremist groups that are worming their way via apps, video gaming and social media into the minds of the very young. Paul-Edouard Lallois, the French prosecutor who secured the boy’s conviction on two terror-related charges last August, said the thousands of images and other extreme content that the child viewed so warped his understanding of the world and of right and wrong that “it will take years and years of work to enable this kid to recover normal bearings.” The prosecutor believes that left unstopped, the boy was on a trajectory to possibly becoming a “completely dehumanized soldier” who risked joining the ranks of digitally radicalized teenagers in France and beyond who are hatching terror plots and expressing support for extremism.
The huge library of violent content, several terabytes of data, that the boy amassed included video tutorials on bomb-making, the prosecutor said. “It is possible to completely upend the mental bearings of such a young child,” he said. “Do that for a few years, and even before he has turned 18, he’s already capable of, yes, committing an attack and the worst things with just a knife.
” A growing threat Across Europe and further afield, the picture is similar: Counterterrorism agencies are grappling with a new generation of attackers, plotters and acolytes of extremism who are younger than ever and have fed on ultraviolent and potentially radicalizing content largely behind their screens. Some are appearing on police radars only when it’s too late — as they’re carrying out an attack. Olivier Christen, a national anti-terrorism prosecutor who handles France’s most serious terror investigations, has a firsthand view of the surging threat.
His unit handed terror-related preliminary charges to just two minors in 2022. That number leapt to 15 in 2023 and to 19 last year. Some are “really very, very young, around 15 years old, which was something that was almost unheard of no more than two years ago,” Christen said in an interview with The Associated Press.
It “demonstrates the strong effectiveness of the propaganda disseminated by terrorist organizations, which are quite good at targeting this age group.” The so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing network that usually shuns the limelight — comprising U.S.
, U.K., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand security agencies — is so alarmed that it took the unusual step in December of calling publicly for collective action, saying: “Radicalized minors can pose the same credible terrorist threat as adults.
” In Germany, an Interior Ministry task force launched after deadly mass stabbings last year is focusing on teenagers’ social networks, aiming to counter their growing role in radicalization. In France, the domestic DGSI security agency says 70 percent of suspects detained for involvement in alleged terror plots are under the age of 21. In Austria, security services say a 19-year-old suspect arrested in August — with an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old — for an alleged ISIS-inspired plot to slaughter Taylor Swift concertgoers was radicalized online.
So, too, was a suspected ISIS supporter, aged 14, detained this February for an alleged plan to attack a Vienna train station, Austrian authorities say. The VSSE intelligence agency in Belgium says almost a third of suspects detained there for plotting attacks from 2022 to 2024 were minors — the youngest only 13. Extremist propaganda “is just a click away for young people in search of an identity or a purpose,” it said in a January report.
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