A 53-year-old woman has been jailed for 15 months for sending a Facebook message saying: ‘Don’t protect the mosques, blow the mosque up with the adults in it’.

Julie Sweeney was jailed at Chester Crown Court today after she admitted to sending a communication to convey a threat of death or serious harm on August 3.

The comment was made on a local community Facebook community group from her home in Church Lawton, Cheshire, which was later reported to the police.

She is one of several people sentenced in recent days for offences related to encouraging unrest online.

Sentencing, Judge Steven Everett, the Honorary Recorder of Chester, said: ‘I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the defendant would have been involved in that herself.

‘But so-called keyboard warriors like her have to learn to take responsibility for their language — particularly in the context of the disorder that was going on around the country.’

The court heard that Ms Sweeney had led a ‘quiet, sheltered life’.  

The rioters – believed by police to be ‘supporters of the English Defence League’ – started hurling items at the mosque on July 30 

A police van was set on fire near a mosque in Southport on Tuesday, July 30 as riots broke out 

Sarah Badrawy, prosecuting, told the court that one of the community group’s 5,100 members on Facebook became ‘uneasy’ at a number of comments posted on the site in the wake of the widespread violent disorder.

Following the posting of a photograph which showed a number of white and Asian people involved in the clean-up from the aftermath of the Southport disorder, Julie Sweeney posted: ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosques up with the adults in it.’

Miss Badrawy said the concerned member found the posting ‘offensive’ and ‘did not like reading it’. 

The post was later deleted, the court heard.

Thousands of people have now been arrested in connection with this summer’s far-right riots, including a 60-year-old who weeped in court, a lout who assaulted a female police officer and a thug who ‘barreled into police’.

Offenders as young as 12 have been brought through the courts, as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer vowed ‘extremists’ would feel the full weight of the law following the riots in England and Wales.

Among the 575 people who have so far been charged are a Sainsbury’s looter who called a judge a ‘b****’ in court and a man jailed for three years for storming a hotel containing vulnerable asylum seekers.

A man has also appeared in court today denying he had an imitation AK-47 rifle during a counter-protest while a rioter who turned up to a demo with a balaclava and a hammer has admitted he made a ‘bad, stupid mistake’. 

Far-right rioters are seen attempting to enter the Holiday Inn Express Hotel in Rotherham, housing asylum seekers, on August 4

Police are seen standing guard as protests were held in Manchester on August 3

Courts are again packed with defendants today after far-right yobs took to high streets in towns and cities across the UK following the killings of three young girls in Southport on July 29. The attack was wrongly blamed on a fictitious Islamist migrant, a theory spread through online misinformation.

Violence broke out in cities across England and also in Northern Ireland — and has been followed by a hundreds of charges.

Now a judge has said prosecutors ‘do need to look’ at charging ringleaders of the violence with the greater offence of rioting, rather than just violent disorder.