All of the four activists who raided a Wolverhampton arms factory were immediately released on bail after the jury was deadlocked, John McEvoy and Hanna-Johara Dokal report.
Roof of Moog factory in Wolverhampton; area around “Free Palestine” banner enlarged by Consortium News for visibility. (Staffordshire police handout via Declassified-UK)
After more than 17 hours of deliberation, a jury at Birmingham crown court on Thursday failed to reach a verdict over whether four pro-Palestine activists committed criminal damage at an arms factory.
Iain Evans, Hana-Yun Stevens, Frank Sherman and Hisham Alkhamezi were each accused of criminal damage at a factory owned by Moog, a U.S. aerospace firm, in Wolverhampton.
During the trial, the jury saw footage from helicopters and CCTV cameras which showed the defendants crashing through the site’s front gate and damaging solar panels on its roof.
Prosecution lawyers presented this as an open-and-shut case given the defendants admitted in court to occupying the roof in order to shut down the factory’s production line.
Prosecutors said the trial “is not about Israel, it’s not about Palestine… It’s simply about whether they unlawfully damaged property.”
But the jury was also shown a social media post demonstrating that the activists’ goal was to disrupt the supply of U.K.-made fighter jet components to Israel.
In that social media post, the four defendants were wearing T-Shirts bearing the names of Palestinians who had been killed by Israeli airstrikes, including the author Refaat Alareer.
Watch Declassified UK’s report from outside court
Defence counsel Mira Hammad told the court last week that there was “no mystery about why the [four defendants] were there.”
It was “on their T-shirts. It’s right there in… the tweet [discussing] military aircraft parts to Israel”.
Shortly after the verdict was delivered, Yun-Stevens and Sherman addressed some 20 supporters who had gathered outside the courthouse.
[SEE: ‘We Wanted to Save Lives,’ Anti-Genocide Activists Tell Court]
Yun-Stevens led chants of “Free Palestine” while Sherman thanked those who had offered encouragement throughout the trial.
Evans, wearing a keffiyeh, told Declassified he felt “relieved” by the verdict.
A one-minute silence was also held outside the courthouse for Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza.
‘The More Lives We Would Save’
An activist uses a power tool to cut through the roof of Moog’s factory in Wolverhampton. (Staffordshire police handout via Declassified-UK)
During the trial, the jury also heard from the defendants directly.
Alkhamesi, 23, told the court last Tuesday that the “main intention” of the action was “to occupy the roof” because the “factory can’t operate while we’re on the roof.”
Evans, who previously worked in the aerospace sector, told the court: “We believed the longer we stayed up there, the more lives we would save. The idea was that the longer we stay on the roof, the longer the factory would be shut down.”
Yun-Stevens described the concept of direct action and noted in court how a full arms embargo has still not been imposed on Israel.
Sherman, who dismissed their own legal representation to offer their own closing statement, declared: “I will always in my heart know that using care and intention to disarm the factory is not criminal.”
Police detain three of the group on the roof of Moog’s factory in Wolverhampton. (Staffordshire police handout via Declassified-UK)
They added: “As Iain told you, the longer we stayed up there, the more lives we could save; as Hisham told you, we intended to disrupt shipments, disrupt production; and as Hana told you, we disrupted only what we deemed to be criminal.”
All of the four activists have been immediately released on bail.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is expected to decide on whether it seeks a retrial within the coming weeks.
[In similar cases of direct action against Israel-linked munitions plants in Britain judges have refused to allow defendants to explain the reasons for their action and these cases resulted in convictions. In one case four activists received a combined 25 years in prison on terrorism charges for merely destroying property.]
John McEvoy is chief reporter for Declassified UK. John is an historian and filmmaker whose work focuses on British foreign policy and Latin America. His PhD was on Britain’s Secret Wars in Colombia between 1948 and 2009, and he is currently working on a documentary about Britain’s role in the rise of Augusto Pinochet.
Hanna Dokal is a video journalist based in the UK. She has worked on short documentaries, commercial shoots and short video content for global publications. She was previously the social video producer for the Financial Times and a freelance writer focusing on human rights.
This article is from Declassified UK.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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