This is the moment an extremist bomb-maker who stockpiled weapons in Britain’s biggest traveller site in preparation for a ‘race war’ was arrested in his caravan.
Dramatic bodycam footage shows a team of armed police officers detaining Thomas McKenna at his Buckles Lane compound in South Ockendon, Essex.
The 60-year-old lorry driver is being sentenced at Kingston Crown Court where he faces jail alongside his girlfriend and two car dealers who bought his converted guns.
McKenna admitted a string of firearms and explosives offences linked to an illegal weapons supply chain stretching across London and the South East.
He had converted a series of Turkish-made blank-firing pistols to fire live ammunition, and was inserting hollow-point bullets into blank rounds that were specifically designed to expand on impact.
His girlfriend Tina Smith, a 55-year-old bus driver, admitted possessing a prohibited firearm, making explosives and three terrorism offences.
Car salesmen Allan Crosby and Ryan Smith, both 40, are also facing jail after being convicted of firearms offences, while Crosby additionally admitted to possessing cocaine with intent to supply.
The underworld operation was uncovered after the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, SO15, raided McKenna’s compound in November 2024.
The site, originally authorised in the 1940s for travelling showmen with around 31 caravan pitches, had been unlawfully expanded to 111 pitches and was housing more than 1,000 people.
Inside one of McKenna’s caravans, officers discovered gunpowder, homemade explosives and a fully equipped workshop used to convert blank-firing pistols imported from Turkey into lethal firearms.
Police also seized extremist material revealing McKenna’s links to extreme right-wing anti-Muslim ideology.
Prosecutor Emily Dummett told the court in the sentencing hearing today that McKenna had been ‘stockpiling explosives, firearms and improvised explosive devices for, as in [his] communications, a race war to fight and kill the Muslims, the immigrants, and so on.’
In a text to an associate saved as ‘Hero’ in his phone on August 19, 2024, McKenna said: ‘Bro, that’s why I believe our only course for survival freedom is strike now while we have the numbers and hard unalive the f***ing lot of them.’
Ms Smith, prosecutors said, shared similar views, writing in a text of her own in 2024: ‘They have to be gone from this country. Shoot them all.’
A total of six Ceonic pistols converted to fire live ammunition were recovered from the caravan park and in Edgware, Harrow, Stanmore and Maidstone and linked to McKenna.
Police also recovered a single-firing shotgun disguised as a torch and replicas of an AK47 and a Sten Mark II sub-machine gun. While the copies were non-firing, their parts could have been useful for conversion to a live weapon.
Detectives identified McKenna’s handiwork through toolmark analysis, comparing the marks on converted parts to the tools he had in one of three caravans that he lived across at Buckles Lane with his girlfriend, Ms Smith.
McKenna, who pleaded guilty to 14 charges ranging from converting firearms, possession of firearms and ammunition, conspiracy to sell, attempting to make explosives and possessing terrorist material, has previous convictions for firearms offences, the court heard.
He, Crosby and Mr Smith had been banned from possessing ammunition because of their previous offending.
Ms Smith had sought to deny that she knew what McKenna was up to in the caravan – but her DNA was found on gun parts inside converted firearms.
Prosecutors also said that a text message exchange from 2022, in which McKenna had asked ‘Where is my pistol babe? I’ve lost it’, to which she replied: ‘I’ve put it in the top drawer in the front room’, was evidence she knew of his dealings with guns.
The court heard that McKenna sent associates reams of texts exhorting them to arm up and prepare for ‘war’.
Using a British military term for killing in one text in February 2024, he wrote: ‘I don’t understand why we’re not slotting them [Muslims]. I think it will happen this year.’
Alongside firearms, crossbows, knuckle dusters and hunting knives, police also recovered two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) made from plastic fish feeders, each containing 73g and 165g of gunpowder, a bullet to serve as the explosive charge and cotton wool as wadding, wrapped in plastic tape.
One of the IEDs also contained seven rounds of ammunition and seven screws to function as shrapnel. Experts deemed the devices viable if a means of detonation was added.
Officers also recovered a tub containing 4kg of gunpowder – also known as black powder – which bore DNA that was linked to Ms Smith.
In the caravan were also the three ingredients needed to make black powder in varying quantities: 1kg of potassium nitrate, 761g of sulphur and 225g of a carbon-type substance such as charcoal.
A tub of nitrocellulose – a highly flammable substance commonly used a propellant in firearm ammunition – that was found also bore DNA matched to McKenna.
McKenna, Crosby and Mr Smith sat in the dock, while Ms Smith watched via videolink from a prison in a wheelchair after injuring her ankle on remand.
McKenna appeared to listen intently, holding his head in his hands as incriminating text messages were read out and fidgeting with a glasses pouch.
All six Ceonic pistols were examined by an expert and test-fired – each was deemed viable. Some of those found were even loaded with live ammo.
Among the handbooks McKenna and Ms Smith possessed was a handbook called ‘The DIY Sten’, which provided a guide to producing a Sten machine gun using scrap metal shaped with hacksaws and files.
The couple also had YouTube videos on how to produce gunpowder, including one entitled: ‘Homemade Gunpowder, For Science! How To Make Gunpowder – DIY Gunpowder Experiment!’
McKenna also admitted having a video entitled ‘Everything black powder – how to make the absolute best powder (for firearms)’ in his possession – alongside a US Army handbook on producing improvised explosives such as pipe bombs and another on the same subject called ‘Poor Man’s James Bond’.
McKenna was converting the Coenic guns for onward transfer and sale – while also stockpiling his own cache of weapons for an anticipated ‘race wair’.
The Turkish-made pistols were a ‘popular choice of criminals’ because they were ‘easy to get hold of’ compared to real guns, Ms Dummett said, adding: ‘They can then be used to threaten, to seriously injure and to kill.’
Among the texts McKenna sent were ‘We have to fully dominate the Muslims or there will never be peace,’ and ‘I have a bunch of s**t. I’m stockpiling. Hit them on the approach. Ambush them.’
Hossein Zahir KC, for McKenna, sought to argue that the 60-year-old’s firearms offences were at the lower end of the scale as the guns were ‘not hard to convert’ and ‘unsophisticated’. None of the pistols had been used when recovered.
The manufacture of the black powder, he said, was borne out of ‘experimental purposes’ and the ‘pursuit and interest in firearms’, and that the manuals and videos McKenna possessed were ‘widely available on the internet’.
But Judge Peter Lodder KC, alluding to McKenna’s text messages in which he talked about ‘stockpiling’, noted: ‘The communications are not about, ‘I’m going to have an experiment,’ are they?’
Mr Zahir said the subjects of McKenna’s texts – including fears of a ‘civil war’ involving migrants and Muslims and detailing plans to move to Canada, Iceland or Scotland – were ‘fantasies’.
‘He doesn’t desire such an outcome – but rather he believes it is an inevitability brought about by others,’ Mr Zahir said.
‘There are expressions of intolerance, anger, racist ideation. But there are no targeted threats of violence nor an actual targeting even in the most generalised way.’
Mr Zahir also described McKenna as holding ‘idiosyncratic views’.
Charles Langley KC, for Ms Smith, said while she had admitted making some of the black powder and knew some of it may have been used for ammunition, there was ‘insufficient’ evidence to show that she knew it was being used in IEDs.
Judge Lodder said: ‘I find it implausible that she did not know.’
A psychiatric report had identified her as being ‘dependent and compliant’ in her relationships owing to past trauma, and was considered ‘vulnerable’. She has no previous convictions.
Mr Langley added: ‘There is support for the fact she was, if not directly pressured, but manipulated into helping Mr McKenna.
‘She was deferential, and she was compliant, which can make people act in a way which is completely different to the way in which people usually act.’
McKenna first came to the attention of officers after he was suspected of supplying a converted pistol and expanding ammunition found during a search of Sterling Sports and Prestige Ltd, a high-end car dealership in Kent run by Crosby and Mr Smith.
He admitted offences including converting imitation firearms, conspiracy to sell prohibited firearms and ammunition, possession of prohibited weapons and attempting to make explosives.
Ms Smith admitted possession of a prohibited firearm relating to a converted Ceonic blank-firing pistol and pleaded guilty alongside McKenna to making explosives, although both denied any terrorist plot.
They pleaded not guilty to possessing other weapons, including crossbows, throwing axes, a hunting knife and knuckle dusters, for a terrorist purpose, but admitted holding documents and videos likely to be useful to someone preparing an act of terrorism.
Among the material seized was a guide on how to make a Sten submachine gun from scrap metal.
The National Crime Agency has warned that organised crime gangs are increasingly converting blank-firing pistols imported from Turkey into viable weapons.
A Crown Prosecution Service source confirmed McKenna and Ms Smith were linked to anti-Muslim extremism but acted independently and were not part of any recognised group.
A source linked to the case described the dramatic raid at Buckles Lane, saying: ‘People are used to police turning up on the site, but this was something else.
‘There was a full-blown troop of armed police in helmets searching everywhere and police vehicles all over the place.
‘They said they wouldn’t say what was happening but someone managed to get out of one of them that it was to do with bombs and terrorism.’
Details of the wider conspiracy emerged during the trial of Crosby and Mr Smith, both 44, who ran Sterling Sports and Prestige from a business unit in Mereworth, near Maidstone.
The pair, who met in prison while serving sentences for separate drug offences, were arrested in March last year after DNA linked Smith to a gun and Crosby to ammunition found at their premises.
Forensic tests showed the weapon and ammunition had been made in an identical way to those produced at McKenna’s workshop.
Crosby admitted possession of ammunition and possession with intent to supply around half a kilo of cocaine. Both men denied possession of the firearm, claiming no knowledge of how their DNA ended up on it.
The jury additionally found Crosby guilty of possession of a firearm, while Mr Smith was convicted of possession of both the firearm and ammunition.
Defence arguments are yet to be heard for Crosby and Mr Smith, who is of no relation to Ms Smith.
The hearing is set to resume on February 6.
