Lancashire neo-Nazi Jack Renshaw who plotted to kill MP Rosie Cooper left 'disfigured' in prison attack
A Lancashire neo-Nazi and convicted paedophile who plotted to murder a Member of Parliament has been left ‘disfigured’ in a prison attack.
Jack Renshaw, 30, from Skelmersdale, was jailed for life in 2019 for plotting to kill former West Lancs MP Rosie Cooper.
The white supremacist and child sex offender was reportedly left disfigured after he was attacked by a fellow inmate at HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
According to The Sun, Renshaw was targeted over his far-right views and wounded by a ‘makeshift weapon’. The Sun said Iain Ochieng, a rapist from Bristol, is allegedly being investigated over the assault, which occurred at the same prison where disgraced Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins was murdered last year while serving a sentence for child sex offences.
Renshaw is said to have been slashed with a makeshift 'shank' knife and left with “a gaping wound running the length of his face."
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: "The police are investigating an incident that took place at HMP Wakefield. We take a zero tolerance approach to violence across the prison estate and any perpetrators will be punished."
Renshaw was born in Ormskirk in 1995 and raised in Skelmersdale. As a child, he moved to Blackpool and later became involved with the English Defence League (EDL).
The EDL had been popular in Blackpool since the disappearance of Charlene Downes in 2003, with the group accusing Asian and Arab takeaway workers.
Renshaw later joined the BNP before becoming a spokesperson for National Action. He was an economics and politics student at Manchester Metropolitan University and an organiser for the BNP Youth – the youth wing of the British National Party (BNP).
Child sex offences
His child sexual offences involved contacting 13- to 15-year-old boys in 2016 and 2017, sending graphic photographs of himself, and offering them gifts, money, and drugs to send him intimate photos and to have sex with him.
Jurors at Preston Crown Court found him guilty of four counts of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.
He also received a three-year prison sentence two months earlier when he was found guilty of stirring up racial hatred after he called for the genocide of Jewish people.
Plot to murder MP
On June 12, 2018, Renshaw pleaded guilty to preparing an act of terrorism with the intention of killing the Labour MP Rosie Cooper, and to making a threat to murder a police officer.
Renshaw's plot to kill Ms Cooper came just a year after the terrorist murder of MP Jo Cox, who was shot and stabbed outside a library in Birstall, West Yorkshire, in 2016.
His trial heard that he wanted to replicate the murder of Ms Cox and that he'd bought a 19-inch knife. The attack was prevented when a whistleblower leaked the murder plot to anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate.