(Age) In an unassuming family home in the heart of Werribee, a 16-year-old boy watched the atrocities of Islamic State with his brother for up to three hours each night.
Videos of beheadings and bloody executions in the Middle East consumed his teenage world and he later admitted to dreaming of his own dead body amid a terror attack in the centre of Melbourne.
Ali Khalif Shire Ali, now 22, now faces life behind bars after his sordid obsession grew into a plan of mass murder.
On Thursday, Shire Ali became one of a scant few charged under the country’s terror legislation to step into the witness box in an attempt to elicit mercy from a Supreme Court judge.
