Two boys who plotted to kill their classmates in a Columbine-style school massacre in Yorkshire have been sentenced to a total of 22 years in custody.

Thomas Wyllie and Alex Bolland were just 14 when they decided to commit 'one of the worst atrocities in British history' with guns and homemade bombs.

The 15-year-old friends from Yorkshire fantasised about murdering classmates and teachers like 'heroes' Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did when they killed 13 people in Colorado in 1999.

Thomas Wyllie (left) and Alex Bolland (right) have been sentenced to a total of 22 years for plotting a Columbine-style school massacre

The pair ‘devoured’ information about US shootings online and watched CCTV footage of the Columbine massacre and even dressed like their ‘heroes,’ Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said.

The pair planned the massacre using explosives and guns at their school in Northallerton.

They created a 'hit-list' of targets - which included students who had bullied and wronged them, as well as teachers.

This is the contents of the gang's rucksack found by police at their hideout, which contained componants for a bomb and masks

But their plot emerged last year when one confided in a female friend on Snapchat and police found a 'hideout' with a rucksack filled with bomb ingredients.

Wylie, the ringleader, was given 12 years behind bars in an young offender institute.

The eldest of the plotters, he has been described as the leader and main instigator.

He discussed his motivations for the plan in a diary which espoused what jurors were told was his 'twisted ideology'.

The inside cover of the book, which was recovered from the teenager's home in October 2017, apologises for either committing 'one of the worst atrocities in British history' or killing himself.

Later he added: ‘I just want to kill every single one of you f***ers. Everyone is filthy and deserve [sic] to be shot, including me. I’ll play the role of god and decide who a [sic] let live and die.’ Wyllie had a detailed knowledge of guns and the so-called Dark Web, where he watched videos of distressing material, including live suicides, which he shared on social media. The Dark Web is a network of hidden websites where users can remain anonymous.

The journal also features a page of 'stuff we need' to execute the plan, including napalm, firearms and pipe bombs.

Wylie was given 12 years behind bars in an young offender institute. Pictured: Nails believed to have been bought for a explosive device

Wyllie’s parents, Andrew, 60, and Lynn, 45, who live in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, were so concerned about his internet use they handed his computer to police months before his arrest. Both boys shared messages about killing themselves and taking others with them by ‘shooting up the school’.

But despite a series of tip-offs from classmates, teachers and parents, police initially refused to take the threat seriously.

North Yorkshire Police investigated four complaints about Wyllie over a six-month period, but nothing was done.

In a secret hideout, Wylie had kept a rucksack filled with screws, boards and flammable liquid, which prosecutors suggested were instruments for making an explosive device which was to be part of the killing.

A bottle containing flammable liquid that was found by officers searching the older boy's hideout. A rucksack full of equipment was also found, which prosecutors claimed were instruments for building an explosive

Prosecutors told how the boy had also warned his then-girlfriend that he wanted to murder her parents, so that he could run away with her and become a 'natural born killer'.

Wyllie, who held neo-Nazi views, was also convicted of unlawful wounding for carving his name into his girlfriend’s back with a pen knife.

Bolland, also 15, was given a ten-year custodial sentence after being convicted of the same conspiracy to murder at Leeds Crown Court.

The boys, who were just 14 when they launched a murderous attack on their Yorkshire school, sat motionless in the dock as they were told the lengths of their sentences.

The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, told the pair that their plan 'was not wishful thinking or fantasy, it was a real plot'.

She said: 'You are both 15-years-old and you were only 14 last year when you planned to murder teachers and pupils at your school in North Yorkshire by shooting them in a re-enactment of the Columbine massacre.'

A chat between the two defendants previously shown in court in which the older boy suggests they should 'shoot up the school'

The judge added that it was a 'firm plan with specific targets in mind as well as a plan to make indiscriminate explosives'.

She concluded her remarks by saying that the boys had intended to cause 'terror on the scale of the school shootings that have been seen in America'.

‘The unchecked consumption of such material on the internet is capable of poisoning young minds to such an extent that two disaffected murderers, who killed themselves after ending the lives of innocent people, can become the focus of adulation and imitation,’ she said.

‘Children need to be taught better that they must exercise self-control in surfing the internet, for their own safety and mental health.’

During their trial, prosecutors claimed that the pair had 'hero-worshipped' Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenagers responsible for murdering 13 people at Columbine High School, Colorado, in 1999.

In the police interviews that followed their arrests in October 2017, both boys attempted to claim that the plan was nothing more than a fantasy, but in May jurors at Leeds Crown Court convicted them of conspiracy to murder.

Columbine: The massacre that sent waves across the US and the world The massacre at Columbine High School was the direct inspiration for the teenagers' plot in North Yorkshire. When prosecutors opened the case against the pair at Leeds Crown Court, the first thing they explained to the jury was what happened in Jefferson County, Colorado, in April 1999. The court heard how two students at Columbine High - Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - shot and killed 12 students and a teacher and injured many others. The Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (pictured) were hero-worshipped by the two Yorkshire schoolboys for murdering 13 people in 1999 Prosecutor Paul Greaney QC told the jury: 'Eighteen years after the Columbine Massacre and nearly 4,500 miles away, two young teenagers in North Yorkshire became fascinated with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. 'The two teenagers researched and discussed those killers and their interest in them turned to hero-worship. It was against that background that they plotted their own attack upon the school they attended.' Columbine was not the first, and was certainly not the last school shooting in the United States. And it is not even the most deadly. But 'Columbine' has become shorthand for the recurring American horror story of students murdering their own classmates in sometimes inexplicable circumstances. Since 1999, there have been dozens of other similar atrocities in the United States. Students run Columbine High School as the two gunmen went on a shooting spree killing fifteen including children and teachers Examples include the Red Lake tragedy - when a 16-year-old went into his former high school on a Native American reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota, with three guns and shot more than a dozen people, killing seven. Perhaps the most chilling of all American school shooting happened on February 29, 2000 when a six-year-old boy shot classmate Kayla Rolland, also six, at their elementary school in Michigan. Witnesses are reported to have said the little boy shouted 'I don't like you' to his victim. In December 2012, 20 children and six adults were killed in an attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut - an atrocity which has rivalled Columbine in its infamy. But this differs from Harris and Klebold's murders in that the perpetrator was a 20-year-old adult who had left the school many years before. Part of the shock surrounding the Northallerton plot is that these kind of horrors are seen as a distinctly American phenomenon. Earlier this year, CNN identified 288 school massacres in the United States since 2009 compared with five in the whole of the other six G7 industrialised countries combined. The second country on CNN's list was Mexico with eight identified school shooting over the same time period. Students massacring their classmates and teachers is unheard of in the UK. The only incident remotely comparable involving an armed attacker in the UK is the Dunblane Masscacre of 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and one teacher in a Stirlingshire primary school. In 2014, Spanish teacher Ann Maguire was murdered in a Leeds secondary school when her 15-year-old pupil Will Cornick attacked her with a knife. Advertisement

Detective Chief Superintendent Martin Snowden, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, spoke outside court: 'Whatever their motivation, the intent of the defendants and the direction of their actions, placed others at risk.

'Thankfully, we'll never know if they'd have followed through with their plan.'

Mr Snowden said: 'Young people in particular are vulnerable to external influences, both in the real world and online, which can shape their views and influence their actions.

'While these influences are very difficult to control, it's important we're alive to the display of attitudes or behaviour which concern us and have the confidence to report them.

'On this occasion, those who came forward may ultimately have saved lives.'

In a joint statement, Det Supt Allan Harder, North Yorkshire Police head of safeguarding and Stuart Carlton, director of children's and young peoples service for North Yorkshire County Council added: 'This is a strong community which is committed to its young people and we know we can all pull together to help them to move on with confidence from these difficult times.'