BARRISTERS defending two teenagers accused of planning an attack on a school in Northallerton told the jury there had been no real plans to carry out mass murder.

Leeds Crown Court heard today (Tuesday, May 22) that the two accused teenagers had no real intention to go through with the attack.

Defending the older teen, Richard Pratt QC said an interest in the Columbine high school shooting was not uncommon.

He said young people of 14 and 15 often go looking for dark material to impress friends or turn to behaviour that older generations would disapprove of and asked the jury whether looking at such material “establishes a real intention to murder”.

He continued: “It’s one thing to say, it’s quite another to do.”

He said the boys’ journal entries on wanting to kill people, including a friend’s parents, were a “work of fiction”, written when he had time on his hands, having been excluded from school.

Mr Pratt said the night the older teenager had visited his a friend’s parents’ home it was to run away with the friend, not stab her parents as they lay asleep and that after fleeing the house he rang ChildLine that night to tell them he had run away from home. The ChildLine advisor told him to go to the nearest police station, which he did and finding himself alone and a long way from home, “reality kicked in”.

Defending the younger teenager, Tom Price QC, told the jury that the younger defendant was a “vulnerable young man”.

He said: “He was, you might think, a vulnerable young man. Someone who had been subject to bullying. He said in his interview he had been bullied over four years by a group of 11 others. He was spat on, humiliated, assaulted and abused.

“You know he had been to the school with his mother and nothing had been done.

“You may think he’s not an aggressor but, rather more, a victim.”

Mr Price said although the plans were presented as being inspired by the Columbine shooting, the data captured on the teenager’s online activity seemed to show he had little interest in Columbine or Nazism.

He read the jury a copy of the text messages exchanged between the younger defendant and his mother, in which he asked her if she would buy him a black trench coat on eBay. Mr Price told the jury: “He hasn’t even been able to get himself a trench coat. Organise a shooting - he can’t even organise getting his own trench coat sorted.

“He asked his mum to buy him a trench coat. This is a man that’s going to plant bombs and shoot people?”

The two teenagers, now aged 15, deny conspiring or encouraging each other to kill students and teachers. The older teenager also denies unlawful wounding and aggravated burglary.

The trial continues.