An anti-Islamic terrorist has admitted planning to blow up a mosque with a home-made bomb to avenge the killing of an eight-year-old girl in the Manchester Arena bombing.

Steven Bishop, 41, tampered with fireworks and bought a detonator on the dark web.

He was arrested by counter-terror police at his mother's home in Morden, south London, last October after admitting that he planned to attack the local mosque.

Bishop, from Thornton Heath, south London, initially denied one count of possession of an explosive substance with intent to endanger life or cause damage to property contrary to the Explosives Substance Act 1883 but changed his plea to guilty on the first day of his trial at Kingston Crown Court.

Simon Drew, prosecuting, told an earlier hearing that Bishop was a “dangerous and unpredictable man who has a violent past.”

He was said to have had an “obsession” with the Manchester terrorist attack in 2017 and the death of eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos, the youngest of the 22 killed in the bombing.