Children as young as 10 referred to counter-terror police amid surge in radicalisation through online video games

Senior counter-terrorism officers have revealed troubling figures showing children as young as 10 being enrolled in the Government's Prevent deradicalisation programme over incidents of violence and terrorism.

Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor, who leads UK counter-terrorism policing, warned that one in five of those arrested on terrorism charges in the UK are now minors, citing violent video games as a driving factor.

According to newly emerged police data, close to 3,000 individuals referred to Prevent reported being radicalised by terrorists through online video game platforms.

It was during a gathering of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that Mr Taylor made the disclosure among security officials from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

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He told the assembly: "We arrested 40 children for terrorism-related offences in the UK. That is one in five of our arrests. Ten years ago, that was one in 20.

"We have 10-year-olds in our Prevent programme. There are some really worrying statistics, and it is incumbent on all of us, and it is not unique to the United Kingdom, to do everything we can to tackle that."

Mr Taylor stressed that the age profile of those committing violent, terrorist and sexual crimes continues to fall across the board.

Graeme Biggar, who heads the National Crime Agency, pointed to children appearing in casework "at younger and younger ages".

"We had a case come across our desk this week of eight-year-olds being groomed online through gaming platforms. Sadly, that is not unusual," he added.

The NCA chief also said officers had recently detained a 15-year-old suspected of trying to bring a firearm into Britain.

"We have trials under way, or starting soon, into people who are alleged to have committed cyber offences who were teenagers when they were doing it."

Even while children predominantly remain victims of such crimes, Mr Biggar highlighted the increasing appearance of young people as offenders.

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The Five Eyes alliance also raised concern over nihilist terror groups operating online, including 764 - a satanic organisation targeting vulnerable youngsters, coercing them into sharing explicit images or inflicting self-harm.

Additionally, criminal gangs across the UK have adopted a tactic police describe as "violence as a service", deploying children to carry out brutal attacks on their behalf.

It mirrors practices already widespread among organised crime networks in the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden, where syndicates use minors to conduct assassinations.

Krissy Barrett, commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, spoke about her government's introduction of a social media ban for those under 16 – which the UK has now replicated just this week.

"Our kids are at a crossroads, and the tech companies can be the digital penicillin of our time," she said, "this is an epidemic, let's not sugarcoat it."

Meanwhile, the FBI's co-deputy director Andrew Bailey warned of the ways in which artificial intelligence has "supercharged" cybercrime capabilities.

He detailed the "unprecedented threat" of scam operations in south-east Asia, which exploit human trafficking victims to defraud people worldwide.

He said: "This is fraud on an industrial scale. The mafia of the 1970s and 1980s would have envied the level of infrastructure that these enterprises have."

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