A British judge said Patrick Ruane, 55, had a “compulsive and obsessive” opposition to vaccines and spread his vitriol on the messaging app Telegram. One message included talk of “hitting” England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, on the head.
In a series of posts in 2021, Ruane wrote that he was “all for tracking down and…executing” those who manufactured and delivered COVID-19 vaccines. He encouraged others to “find out where they live, put together a kill squad and shoot them” in their beds.
In a discussion about Mr. Whitty, the vaccine opponent claimed that hitting someone in the back of the head with a baseball bat or a metal sledgehammer would “turn said target into a vegetable for the rest of his life “.
He also called for an “IRA playbook”, a reference to the Irish Republican Army’s bombing and shooting campaign, and advocated blowing up vaccine laboratories and 5G phone towers.
“This was not online chatter – it was encouraging people to seriously harm or kill others, suggesting who to target,” said Acting Commander Gareth Rees, of the United Nations Counter Terrorism Command. the Metropolitan Police, who began investigating Ruane’s messages in 2021.
Prosecutor Julia Faure Walker said the messages reached a “very large audience” on two Telegram chat groups, one of which had 18,000 users and the other 8,000.
Patrick Ruane, an audio producer for films, was initially arrested in November 2021 and charged almost two years later. He was found guilty at London’s Central Criminal Court in September of two counts of inciting terrorism.
During sentencing on Monday, Judge Richard Marks ruled that Ruane’s messages were “extremely dangerous” during a volatile period.
“You were, of course, fully entitled to express your views publicly and to do so in an extremely compelling and forceful manner, if you wished,” the judge said.
“You, however, went much further and, in doing so, committed the offenses for which you were convicted.”
