Incel movement ‘not a terrorist ideology’, says police

Assistant Chief Constable Tim Jaques has argued that August’s Plymouth shootings were not a terror attack and that ‘incel in and of itself is not a terrorist ideology’.

Speaking ay the Global Counter Terror Summit at the International Security Expo, the deputy senior national coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing said they concluded that the shooting was not a terror attack as it had not been ‘driven by an ideology’.

Jaques told journalists that he understood how the shooting had “looked like a terrorist attack”, because of the indiscriminate nature of the victims.

Jake Davison, 22, shot his 51-year-old mother Maxine Davison, also known as Maxine Chapman, at a house in Biddick Drive before he went into the street and murdered Sophie Martyn, three, and her father, Lee Martyn, 43. In the 12-minute attack, Davison then killed Stephen Washington, 59, in a nearby park before shooting 66-year-old Kate Shepherd, who later died at Derriford Hospital. He then killed himself.

Jaques said that the incel movement was ‘on the radar’ for British security services but was not considered a terrorist ideology. Incel ideology has previously been linked to several massacres in the US, and Davison’s spree was the deadliest mass shooting in the UK for more than a decade.