UK: "Lone bomber" an NSM member
01 June 2000
David Copeland, the "lone bomber" responsible for a series of explosions in London which killed three people in April last year, received six life terms at the Old Bailey in July. The 24 year old engineer, who had targeted black and Asian communities in east and west London, killed three people with his final attack on a gay pub in Soho. Copeland, of Hove, Hampshire, had his plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility rejected by a jury. He received three life sentences for the murders and three life sentences for causing explosions in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho (see Statewatch vol 9, no 2, vol 10, no 2). However, questions have been raised about this "outstanding example of modern policing", and misleading information presented at a Scotland Yard press conference after the arrest.
At the press conference journalists were informed that Copeland had no links to the far-right organisations that had claimed responsibility for the bomb attacks. "He was acting alone" journalists were told, a factor that made tracking down the bomber all the more difficult. Technically their statement was accurate as Copeland was neither a member of Combat 18 (C 18) nor the White Wolves, the organisations that had claimed responsibility for the explosions. However, as became clear at his trial, Copeland was a member of a C 18 splinter group, the National Socialist Movement (NSM) at the time of the bombings. His membership card had been found when his home was searched by police.
Copeland had joined the NSM after spending a year as a member of the British National Party (BNP). He was active in east London where he associated with Tony Lecomber, who would have been well known to anti-terrorist units as he was jailed in 1986 for a nail bomb attack on political opponents in south London. The party's current leader, Nick Griffin, was himself a close associate of members of the Italian Nuclei Armati Rivolazionari, who are reported to have escaped extradition to Italy for terrorist acts by becoming informants for the UK's external security services, MI6. The BNP, after initially denying Copeland's membership, went on to acknowledge his "marginal" involvement. More recently, Griffin has asserted that Copeland was a state agent who infiltrated the BNP to undermine their electoral programme - a theory that has received little credibility outside of the more esoteric branches of the extreme-right.
Copeland went on to join the NSM at the end of 1988 or early in 1999. If the Metropolitan police, Special Branch and MI5 had overlooked Copeland's involvement with the UK's largest fascist organisation, they can hardly have missed his involvement in the small, but violent NSM. The NSM was born out of a split with C18 and a feud between their respective leaders, Charlie Sargent and Wil Browning. The culmination of the feud saw the stabbing to death of a Browning supporter by the NSM leader and another man, which resulted in Sargent's imprisonment for life. During Sargent's trial suspicions that the NSM leader was a long-time police informer were confirmed, suggesting that the police would have been very familiar with the modus operandi of his organisation, (following Sargent's jailing his brother, Steve, went on to play a prominent role in the organisation). C18 would also have been under intense scrutiny due to the involvement of Browning in a widely publicised letter-bomb campaign against black British athletes, orchestrated from Denmark (see Statewatch vol 7 no 1, 2, 4 & 5).
It is inconceivable, given the number of agencies involved in the monitoring of the far-right in the UK, the resources at their disposal and a seemingly endless supply of informants, that they can be as ignorant of the activities of the far-right as they claim to be. While Copeland clearly has psychological problems, he was not simply the "disturbed loner" portrayed by Scotland Yard but an active player on the far-right. This milieu gave him access to, info