A JUDGE has said a jury should consider whether two boys intended to replicate an infamous school massacre or whether their “hit list” was only an invention to get their own back on bullies.

Yesterday lunchtime (Wednesday, May 23) the jury retired to consider whether two 15-year-olds are guilty of conspiring or encouraging each other to carry out a Columbine-inspired attack at a school in Northallerton.

The defendants, who cannot be named due to their age, deny conspiracy to murder teachers and students, as well as a charge of intentionally encouraging or assisting each other to carry out murders.

The older boy also denies aggravated burglary and unlawful wounding.

Before the jury of seven women and five men retired at 12.37pm at Leeds Crown Court, the judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, summed up the prosecution and defence cases for them.

She reminded the jury that the younger boy told police he thought the older defendant would really go through with the attack and had mentioned the plans to other pupils as a “cry for help” in the hope someone would stop him.

She told the jury they had to consider that if that was true, they had to ask why he had confessed his plans to a teacher at his school and police nearly a month earlier, on September 28.

Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb reminded the jury of a conversation the younger teen had with a teacher, in which the teacher felt he “idolised” the Columbine killers and how he thought they were doing a service to humanity by getting rid of people.

He quoted some satanic text he had read which spoke of doing to others as they do to you and felt it was justification for what they intended. The teacher described it as the most disturbing thing a pupil had ever said to him.

She told the jury the defendant told the teacher he “wanted justice" for bullying which had led to him having suicidal thoughts.

She said the younger boy also told police later the same day he had suffered bullying for four years at the school, which had driven him to seven suicide attempts. He told police the school had done nothing, despite him and his mother raising it with the school and that they were planning to buy the guns for the shooting on the dark web. He told police he had spoken with a support worker after school that day about his plans and now he had changed his mind because he had thought about the impact on other pupils.

She told the jury: “The prosecution wants you to step back and look over all the incidents and conclude that with the evidence shown the defendants were deadly serious and wanted to replicate an infamous school massacre.

“The prime prosecution case is they plotted to murder. No-one was going to take them seriously - that was part of the problem with the school. They were not in a rush and there was no date to carry out the attack and as far as they could they took care to put their plans into effect.”

She said, on the other hand, the defence maintained the evidence showed “no more than these were two disaffected boys who were unhappy at school” and determined to get their own back on people who had bullied them.

She mentioned the alleged hit list of children and teachers which had been shared by the younger teenager, adding: “A list of names of students and teachers they had problems with, but that would not be unusual in a school where students think they are not being looked after by their teachers.”