Far-right ‘terrorist’ Thomas Mair jailed for life for murder of Labour MP Jo Cox
Mair, 53, has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
Mair repeatedly shot and stabbed Cox in the street outside her constituency surgery during the EU referendum campaign in June. During the attack, he yelled “Britain first,” the court was told.
The 41-year-old mother of two died shortly afterwards in the back of an ambulance.
Judge Alan Wilkie said there was no doubt the murder was because of white supremacy with links to Nazism, and said Mair had betrayed the sacrifices of the generation who had defeated the Nazis.
Mair kept a stash of neo-Nazi material at his home and had assembled a dossier on his Remain-campaigning local member, the Old Bailey heard.
The jury took just over an hour to reach a verdict, the BBC reports.
At the conclusion of the prosecution’s case on Tuesday, Mair’s lawyer Simon Russell Flint, QC, told the court Mair, who denies murder, would not enter the witness box.
He added that he would not be calling any evidence on behalf of Mair.
Mair was also found guilty of possession of an offensive weapon with intent, possession of a firearm with intent, and grievous bodily harm against a 77-year-old man who tried to intervene to save the MP. He had pleaded not guilty to all charges.
During the trial, the jury was shown CCTV footage of the moments leading up to her murder.
The court heard that after Mair fired the first shot, witnesses watched Cox trying to crawl away as he reloaded his gun and shot her two more times.
He also used a dagger to inflict 15 stab wounds, some of which penetrated the MP’s heart, lungs, stomach and liver.
In his closing speech, prosecutor Richard Whittam QC told jurors: "The sheer brutality of her murderer bring the two extremities of humanity face to face."
He said her attack "brought out the best of the people who were with her" - the two members of staff and Birstall residents who came to her aid.
Source: rt.com