TWO MANCHESTER teenagers who have been in jail for six months have been cleared of plotting to kill fellow schoolchildren in a massacre modelled on the Columbine tragedy in Colorado in the United States a decade ago.
The jury took just 45 minutes to find the two, Matthew Swift (18) and Ross McKnight (16), not guilty of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions charges.
A police investigation was launched in March after McKnight crowed when drunk about the plot, which he dubbed “Project Rainbow”, to a female friend, who immediately raised the alarm.
In follow-up searches, police found diaries containing drawings of explosives, photographs of the two Columbine killers – Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold – and detailed plans to copy the Colorado killers’ murders.
The American pair, who had turned against society and hated their peers, killed 12 pupils and a teacher and injured dozens more at their school, Columbine High, in Colorado, on April 20th, 1999, before committing suicide.
McKnight’s father, Raymond, a serving Greater Manchester police constable, had told the court his son had many “hare-brained” ideas, including one where he and Swift would live off the land in Alaska.
In their diaries, the two wrote how they intended to blow up a car at a local shopping centre before exploding another at Audenshaw High School and then killing those who fled the building. Neither of them can drive, however.
After the verdict, John Lord of the Crown Prosecution Service said he had believed sufficient evidence had existed to justify taking the prosecution. “We respect the decision of the jury, they have heard all the evidence,” he said.
Friends and family of both had stood by them during their detention and trial, believing that they would not have carried out their “immature fantasies”, which Swift told the jury were his.
Asked how both youths had coped with being locked up, McKnight’s father, speaking to the Manchester Evening News, replied: “It’s been purgatory, absolute agony. Neither has been in trouble with the police before, and have been in jail for the last six months.”
McKnight spent the last six months in Hindley Young Offenders’ Institute in Manchester, where he took state examinations. Swift was held with adults in Strangeways Prison.