LONDON - Two British teens obsessed with Columbine were acquitted yesterday of charges they plotted a copycat massacre, after a jury rejected the notion that diary entries outlining a similar attack were anything more than a fantasy.
The jury took only 45 minutes to clear Ross McKnight, 16, and Matthew Swift, 18, of plotting an attack at their high school east of the northwestern English city of Manchester on the 10th anniversary of the US killings.
The 12-member panel, made up of seven women and five men, accepted the teens’ testimony that they never intended to harm anyone.
Prosecutor Peter Wright said the teens planned to emulate the school attack carried out by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 12 students, a teacher, and themselves in a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999.
But British police never found any explosives or weapons in the case - despite the swaggering promises.
“We will walk into school, and at the end of it no one will walk out alive,’’ McKnight wrote in his diary, according to prosecutors.
Notes found in a safe in Swift’s bedroom promised: “Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold will rise again.’’
Police were alerted after McKnight drunkenly called a girl and confessed to the purported plot. The teens were arrested in March, and detectives said they found cellphone camera footage of what they said was the pair making explosives, as well as a cache of extremist literature, a bomb-making manual, and a map of the school.
