Standing in his bedroom, wearing a mask and boilersuit, a teenage boy is posing with a 9mm semiautomatic Glock handgun pointed at the camera, acting out in his mind a plan to massacre students at his former college in less than 24 hours’ time.

The self-portraits (above) were taken on Sunday 2 November 2014 in the same bedroom where Liam Lyburd, then aged 18, had bought an arsenal of weapons, including homemade pipe bombs, CS gas canisters, and 94 expanding bullets, through shadowy online cryptomarkets. He had written “BITCH KILL” on the wall.

But this was not in America, where school shootings have become tragically commonplace. This was Newcastle upon Tyne.



A message on his laptop that was deleted that night but later recovered by police read: “It’s funny to think as I’m writing this that people who will die are walking around as if everything is normal, not knowing they’re going to die today, it’s a beautiful thought.”

But Lyburd’s plot to indiscriminately kill students at Newcastle College came to nothing. Police raided his home at 11:30am on Monday 3 November, hours before he was planning to carry out the attack, after someone who had seen his increasingly erratic and threatening posts on Facebook raised the alarm.

As an army bomb squad searched the house, near Newcastle United's St James' Park stadium, around 50 neighbours were evacuated.

As they led him away, he told officers they’d just averted a massacre.