Teenagers ‘plotted copycat massacre’

TWO teenagers inspired by the Columbine school massacre planned a copycat killing spree.

Loners Matthew Swift (18) and Ross McKnight (16), spent more than a year making elaborate plans to bomb Crown Point North shopping centre and Audenshaw High School, Manchester Crown Court heard.

They named their plot Project Rainbow, wrote down their plans in diaries and used a mobile phone to record their experiments with explosives.

McKnight’s diary referred to the “greatest massacre ever” and killing thousands of people, prosecutor Peter Wright QC told the jury.

Reading from the diary, Mr Wright said: “We will walk into school and at the end of it no one will walk out alive ... after we have finished in Audenshaw we will have to kill ourselves there and then.”

The pair, who lived on the same street in Denton, intended to carry out the massacre on the 10th anniversary of the Columbine massacre, a jury of seven women and five men heard.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 21 before committing suicide when they opened fire at a high school in Columbine, Colorado, US, on April 20, 1999.

Mr Wright said Swift and McKnight had “discussed, fantasised and eventually agreed to convert their fantasises into reality.”

McKnight, a would–be Olympic weightlifter, still attended the school at the time of the plot and Swift, an ex–pupil, worked at Ikea in Ashton.

Swift was given an exclusion order banning him from Crown Point shopping centre in September, 2007 — which sparked his resentment towards the place, the jury heard.

The plot was revealed by McKnight in a drunken phone call to a girl. She told her mother and it was reported to the police.

In police interviews McKnight refused to comment and Swift told officers “he was a confused teenager with a vivid imagination”.

Both deny conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause explosions between November 11, 2007, and March 15 this year.

The trial continues.