Updated 10.40pm
FAR-RIGHT EXTREMIST Thomas Mair has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release for murdering British MP Jo Cox.
Sentencing Thomas Mair, 53, to a rare “whole life term” punishment, judge Alan Wilkie told him: “Because she was a member of parliament your crime has an additional dimension that calls for particular punishment.
There is no doubt it was done to further a political motive. Your inspiration is not love of country, it is an admiration for Nazis and similar anti-democratic white supremacist creeds.
The jury at London’s central criminal court took just 90 minutes to convict Mair of killing the mother-of-two as she arrived at a library to meet constituents a week for the Brexit vote.
Cox, a 41-year-old member of the opposition Labour party and a vocal supporter of the EU, had been due to meet her constituents in Birstall, northern England, when she was attacked in broad daylight on 16 June.
Mair showed no emotion as the verdicts and sentence were read out.
In his sentencing statement, the judge said that Mair would die in jail and would only be released to die in his home at the discretion of a Secretary of State.
Following the verdict, Cox’s husband Brendan called the murder “a political act and an act of terrorism”.
“We have no interest in the perpetrator, we only feel pity for him,” he added.
Jo was interested in everybody, driven not by her ego but her desire to help.
Far right extremist Mair repeatedly shouted “Britain first” as he shot Cox three times and stabbed her 15 times in a murder that shocked the country, the trial heard.
Mair was also found guilty of possession of an offensive weapon with intent, possession of a firearm with intent, and grievous bodily harm against a 77-year-old man who attempted to intervene during the attack.
Cox was married with two children. She had been campaigning for a Remain vote in the UK’s Brexit referendum at the time of her death.
She was first elected to Parliament in the 2015 General Election.
Police had found Mair’s Birstall home to be full of Nazi literature and other memoribilia in the wake of his arrest.
Investigators found an extensive collection of books on German military history, the Holocaust and Nazi race theory and a statue of a bust of the eagle of Germany’s Third Reich.
At his first court hearing in June, Mair had been asked his name and replied:
Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.
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