Jack Renshaw, the neo-nazi terrorist and convicted paedophile serving a life sentence for plotting to murder a Member of Parliament and other serious offences, has been the victim of a violent assault inside HMP Wakefield.
The attack is understood to have taken place on 9 December at the high-security Category A prison in West Yorkshire, where some of the country’s most serious offenders are held.
A fellow inmate, Iain Ochieng, 32, allegedly used a makeshift weapon to slash Renshaw across the face, leaving him with significant injuries requiring urgent attention.
‘Vicious and pre-planned’
At the time of writing, there has been no official confirmation from the Prison Service or West Yorkshire Police but a senior source has been quoted describing the attack as “vicious and pre-planned”, with Renshaw “lucky to survive”.
Control room staff and prison officers are reported to have intervened to stop the assault once it became visible outside Renshaw’s cell.
Renshaw, a member of the now-banned National Action, was convicted at the Old Bailey in 2019 for preparing an act of terrorism, specifically, a plot to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper and to kill PC Victoria Henderson, the officer investigating him on child sex charges.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years.
He received separate terms for inciting racial hatred and grooming underage boys online.
Born in Lancashire in 1995, he was radicalised as a teenager and became deeply involved in nationalist and racist activism.
He first joined the English Defence League (EDL) as a youngster and went on to become a leading figure in the British National Party (BNP) youth wing, serving as its Youth Liaison Officer in 2014 while studying at Manchester Metropolitan University.
He was a council election candidate for the BNP in Blackpool in 2014.
Renshaw’s politics, however, moved beyond the BNP’s electoral focus into more extreme territory.
In 2016 he was pictured at a demonstration of the far-right North West Infidels and at the same time became associated with National Action, a UK neo-Nazi group that openly embraced overt Nazism and a violent white supremacist ideology.
National Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation under the UK’s Terrorism Act in December 2016, the first far-right group to be banned since the Second World War.
Whistle-blower
Renshaw’s terror plan saw him travel widely to research the MP’s schedule and purchase an online machete he intended to use in the attack.
The plot was thwarted after a National Action whistle-blower, Robbie Mullen, co-operated with HOPE not hate to expose it.
Shortly before the attack Renshaw was visited in prison by Liverpool-based neo-nazi Ryan Ferguson, who was himself out of prison on licence.
Ferguson posted a video – since deleted – about the visit online and was later returned to jail for breaches of he terms of his license.
