18 year old McKenzie Morgan from Cwmbran, South Wales, has been sentenced to 14 months in a young offenders institute, after pleading guilty to purchasing an Al-Qaeda training manual. During a court hearing at the Old Bailey in London, he was alleged to be plotting multiple terror attacks, including an attack on a children’s dance club, and a bombing at Oasis’s first comeback show in Cardiff.
According to a BBC article, Morgan, who has been named by the press following his 18th birthday, is described as a “lone attacker” who had been exposed to dangerous influences. He had been inspired by Axel Rudakubana, who at the age of just 17 committed one of the worst mass-stabbings in British history. In July 2024, he targeted a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, Merseyside, killing 3 girls under the age of 10, as well as seriously injuring 8 more children and 2 adults. He was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in prison in January last year.
Morgan had claimed to be attempting to make the toxin ricin at home, as well as considering attacks on his own school, and had been trying to acquire dangerous knives, though he was limited due to being under 18 at the time. The article also mentions that Morgan had used the mobile app Snapchat to suggest that he had intentions to set explosives at Oasis’s first night of their 2025 reunion tour, which took place at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on the 4th of July.
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This is the latest in a worrying trend of events in music and the arts being targets for acts of depravity. In 2015, three coordinated terror attacks in Paris claimed the lives of 130 people in total, with 416 injured. While there were suicide bombers and shootings in other areas of Paris, the worst was to happen at the Bataclan theater. Gunmen opened fire during an Eagles Of Death Metal show, killing 90 in a crowd of 1,500.
In 2017, two Islamic extremists detonated explosive devices at the Manchester Arena during an Ariana Grande concert, killing 17 and injuring 1,017. An estimated 14,200 people were in the venue at the time, many of them children, teens and their parents. Grande then rescheduled her dates to perform relief show “One Love Manchester”, raising £17 million for the victims of the attack.
There is seemingly no evidence to suggest McKenzie Morgan behaved out of any doctrine or belief system, instead wishing to carry out a “Rudakubana-style attack” on his own. In the words of Det. Supt. Andrew Williams of Counter Terrorism Policing Wales, Morgan was “not born bad” and was “vulnerable to the malign influences that prey on our young people in today’s online word”. As well as his 14 month juvenile detention, he will be kept on license for a year, and must report his residences to the police for the next 10 years.
