[News] Right-wing satanist group 764 gains traction in UK

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An extreme right-wing satanist online community that uses extortion to force children to commit acts of violence and has inspired school massacres in the US is gaining traction in the UK, an investigation has found.

Members of 764 encourage each other to inflict pain on vulnerable youngsters and share the footage in group chats. It urges or blackmails members into filming themselves self-harming, and videos of people taking their own lives have also been shared.

An investigation into 764 by Hope Not Hate, which campaigns against racism and extremism in the UK, concluded that its aim was to “shock and numb its participants and watch the fallout as entertainment”.

Members communicate and share footage on the encrypted channels Telegram, Discord and Wire, which protects them from the authorities.

Hope Not Hate’s investigation found that members of 764 chase the thrill of inflicting pain, coupled with a desire to carve out infamy as the most unhinged members of the group.

Patrik Hermansson, a senior researcher at Hope Not Hate, joined the group chats as part of the investigation. He found that its members are primarily children and young adults, as are their victims.

While extreme gore communities are not new, their content is reaching an increasingly larger audience on mainstream social media, the investigation found.

It discovered how the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have provided a “steady stream of gruesome content” that is shared and used as inspiration for terrorist attacks. The group also targets “vulnerable” online communities that focus on mental health and LGBT issues. A manual released by an affiliated group, No Lives Matter (NLM), claims “the best women to target are ones that have depression or mentally ill ones”.

NLM joined 764 to circulate a manifesto of terrorism. Showing a mocked-up front page of a newspaper, it declared that the groups had “reunited together to bring terror to this mundane world and strike the hearts of all life forms together. The terror will soon commence.”

Since the 764 group was set up in 2021 in the US, several attacks in America and Europe have been carried out by members. In the US, there have been at least 13 arrests related to 764. All were charged over child exploitation material and two school shootings where the perpetrator had connections to the group. Eight of the perpetrators were 20 years of age or younger. In Europe, details of cases are scarce because the culprits were minors, the campaign group said.

Cameron Finnigan, a UK member of 764, was sentenced to six years in jail this year after pleading guilty to encouraging suicide, possessing a terrorism manual and indecent images of a child.

Police found an 11-page document on his computer with detailed instructions on how to carry out a “mass casualty” terrorist attack. He and other members of a Telegram group chat discussed a plot that they called “terror week”.

Finnigan said he planned to murder a homeless man living in a tent near his home. “I won’t stop until he’s dead,” he added.

Following his conviction, counterterrorism police have warned that 764 poses “an immense threat” in the UK.

One of the youngest of the group’s perpetrators was a 14-year-old from Stockholm, Sweden, who was arrested last year after attacking mostly elderly people on eight different occasions by sneaking up on them and stabbing them late at night. He filmed most of the attacks. He went by the moniker Slain764 and ran the local section of NLM.

Source: https://www.thetimes.com/article/25a9a0 ... 0f1f393c1b