LONDON — The police in Britain have credited a group of young Internet users with alerting them to a Web posting by a 16-year-old who said he planned to attack his high school with “arson and other forms of violence,” enabling officers to arrest the teenager as he approached the school carrying a knife, matches and a plastic jerrycan of what the police described as “flammable liquid.”
J. P. Neufeld, a Montreal student, notified the authorities after seeing a threat posted on the Web. The British police then arrested a 16-year-old who they said had a can of a “flammable liquid.”
The incident on Tuesday morning, which involved a high school in Attleborough, a market town 85 miles northeast of London, occurred at a time of growing concern about the role of Internet chat rooms and other forums in giving a platform to disturbed young people with resentments that eventuate in attacks on schools and other targets. In some fatal school attacks in the United States and elsewhere, the assailants’ use of Web forums to air festering grievances has been seen as part of the process that led to the assaults.
In the Attleborough case, the teenager’s use of a Web forum to announce his plan appears to have been the step that made it possible for the attack to be foiled.
Still more notable, the first alert to the police in Norfolk, the largely rural county where Attleborough is located, came in a telephone call from a 21-year-old student in Montreal, more than 3,200 miles away, after he read the posting threatening the school attack while eating his breakfast in a university dormitory.
Only 50 minutes elapsed between that call and the arrest of the youth outside the school, according to a timeline drawn up by J. P. Neufeld, the Montreal student, who said he drew on his own computer records and the accounts given to him by the Norfolk police. In that time, Mr. Neufeld said by telephone on Friday, two other people browsing on the same Web site, newgrounds.com, which is used for sharing music files and user-created animations, provided the information that enabled the police to identify the school that was the target of the planned attack, and the would-be attacker.
The Norfolk police have confirmed that they arrested the 16-year-old student and detained him under Britain’s mental health act. They declined to identify him.
A police spokesman, Superintendent Katie Elliott, credited the arrest to Mr. Neufeld and the other Web browsers who provided warning of the attack. “It goes to show that things written on the Internet can be viewed across the world,” she said, “and we thank the person who has read this and done something about it.”
Mr. Neufeld, who is from Winnipeg, Manitoba, said he was in his dormitory room at 6:40 a.m. on Tuesday, browsing on his computer, when he noticed the posting threatening the attack. What drew his attention to the posting, he said, was that it carried a signature in initials, identified in British news accounts as T. B., and a photograph beneath it taken in the aftermath of the 1999 attack on Columbine High School in Colorado, showing the feet of some of the 13 victims of the two Columbine students who committed the massacre.
The posting consisted of an announcement of the impending attack, Mr. Neufeld said. “What he wrote was, ‘Today at 11:30 GMT I will attack my school with arson and other forms of violence. Those bastards will pay.’ ”
Mr. Neufeld said that the message urged browsers to “watch this site” and to link to the Web sites of local news media in Norfolk, including the BBC’s newsroom in the region, but that it gave no indication which school, or even which town, was the target.
Mr. Neufeld said he made a cellphone call immediately to the Norfolk police. He said his sense of urgency was prompted by his realization that the four-hour time difference between Montreal and Britain meant that there was less than an hour between his sighting of the posting and the time given for the planned attack.
When he spoke to the police, he said, explaining what he had seen on the Web, “they were very polite, and made it plain that they didn’t think it was a hoax at all.”
Mr. Neufeld said that within minutes of his spotting the posting, another youth went online on the newgrounds.com Web site saying he was a “friend of the arsonist” and giving the teenager’s name and the name of the school. A third person, also in Britain and also familiar with the youth and the school, then made a call of his own to the Norfolk police, Mr. Neufeld said.
Until Friday, only sketchy accounts of the incident had appeared in Britain. A fuller account appeared Friday in The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper, and in several regional newspapers in eastern England.
Mr. Neufeld, a student at Concordia University, said the incident demonstrated the ways in which individuals on the Web can contribute to the well-being of others.
“If somebody was standing on a street corner and said, ‘I’m going to go and blow up my school,’ somebody would report it to the police,” Mr. Neufeld said. “In that sense, the Internet is just another public space, where people have to keep their eyes and ears open.”Original here
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