MI5 sting stops neo-Nazi gun plot, man jailed 13.5 years

Alfie Coleman, a former Tesco worker from Great Notley in Essex, was jailed for 13 and a half years at the Old Bailey after MI5 agents lured him to an east London car park and police arrested him as he collected a Makarov pistol and 200 rounds of ammunition. The 22-year-old had been convicted in April of preparing for terrorist acts after a retrial, following a first trial that ended without a verdict.

Prosecutors said Coleman had planned a mass gun attack driven by neo-Nazi, extreme right-wing ideology. Court reporting described him as a militant accelerationist, and said his online radicalization began when he was 14, when he first started trawling the internet for extreme right-wing material. Prosecutors said he had dreamed of fighting a race war, setting out a path from online grievance to a planned attack.

The case also drew attention because the alleged target set was rooted in Coleman’s everyday life. Court reporting said he had saved £3,500 from his part-time supermarket job and drawn up a kill list of Tesco customers and colleagues. He was carrying his Tesco employee card when armed counter-terrorism police confronted him, a detail that underscored how closely the plot was tied to his workplace and routine movements.

The sting in September 2023 stopped the plot before any weapon could be used. MI5 agents drew Coleman to the car park in east London, where officers moved in as he picked up the pistol and ammunition. By intervening at the handoff, investigators blocked the step where online radicalization had turned into a live weapons transfer, shutting down an attack plan before it could reach a public target.

The case lands as a warning about the changing shape of domestic extremism in Britain: a lone suspect, a small cache of weapons, years of online radicalization and a clear ideological motive. It also shows how counter-terrorism teams are using undercover online tactics and physical stings together to identify early warning signs, disrupt far-right plots and prevent lone-actor violence before it reaches the street.