After 37 hours of deliberation, the jury was unable to reach verdicts on most of the charges of organizing a raid on an Israeli weapons plant and the defendants were discharged Wednesday.
Defendants stand outside the Old Bailey during the trial. (Supplied to DeclassifiedUK)
By Dania Akkad
Declassified UK
Jurors in an eight-week trial of Palestine Action activists who allegedly planned a raid on an Israeli-owned arms factory were discharged on Wednesday.
It came after they told the court they had been unable to reach verdicts for seven of the defendants.
An eighth defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was found guilty of criminal damage by a majority of 9-to-1 jurors.
Last month, the jury acquitted one of the defendants, Will Plastow, of violent disorder over a lack of evidence.
Plastow and his co-defendants — Madeleine Norman, 31, Hannah Davidson, 53, Ian Sanders, 47, Aleksandra Herbich, 41, Teuta Hoxha, 30, Sean Middlebrough, 33 and Yulia Brigadirova, 33 — may now face a retrial.
But several smiled broadly in the dock as the jury was discharged.
Friends and family members watching the trial from the public gallery clapped and cheered as the defendants filed out of the courtroom and later into the street to join around a hundred supporters. “I believe that we have won,” they chanted.
All eight were accused of planning a break-in at an Israel-owned arms factory in the Filton area of Bristol on Aug. 6, 2024.
Six other members of a Palestine Action “red team” broke into the Elbit Systems factory and damaged more than a dozen drones.
Elbit System’s multi-payload long range “MALE” — medium altitude, long endurance — military drone displayed at the Singapore Air Show 2012. (Choo Yut Shing, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The incident took place at the height of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and before Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government had implemented any restrictions on arms exports to Tel Aviv.
The raid sparked an unprecedented crackdown called Operation Recomply, led by Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command.
This saw police arrest individuals across the U.K. on suspicion of helping with the break-in, even if they did not step foot at the factory.
Defendants spent up to 18 months in pre-trial detention, with some going on hunger strike to protest at their conditions.
Cooking Pasta, Giving Rides
None of the eight defendants were on the factory premises when the raid happened.
But prosecutors used joint enterprise powers, normally reserved for gangland murders, to pursue them however tenuous their connections to the break-in.
One defendant, Aleksandra “Ola” Herbich, was alleged to have cooked pasta for the activists the night before they broke in and paid £50 for the group to stay at a campsite.
Another, Hannah Davidson, was accused of giving someone from the red team, Jordan Devlin, a lift to a DIY store to buy equipment used in the break-in.
This was despite Devlin having already been found not guilty of any crime relating to the incident.
In a moment of farce during the trial, Devlin waved to the jury from the public gallery after a defendant gave evidence naming him as a friend.
Police had so little evidence against a third defendant, Yulia Brigadirova, that her barrister told the court “perhaps she should be called the invisible coordinator.”
Outcome for ‘Red Team’
The six “red team” members – Leona Kamio, 30, Samuel Corner, 23, Fatema Rajwani, 21, and Charlotte Head, 29, Jordan Devlin, 31, and Zoe Rogers, 22 who now goes by the name Joey Hinchliffe – were tried twice earlier this year.
Their first trial ended in February with the jury acquitting all six of aggravated burglary and three of the defendants on violent disorder charges.
The jury, however, was unable to reach verdicts on criminal damage for all six, violent disorder charges for the remaining three and a grievous bodily harm with intent charge for one.
In May, following a retrial, Kamio, Corner, Rajwani and Head were found guilty of criminal damage. Corner was acquitted of causing grievous bodily harm with intent, but found guilty of inflicting grievous bodily harm without intent.
They were sentenced to a combined total of more than 25 years in prison.
A hearing about a retrial for the eight defendants tried this summer is expected in September.
Dania Akkad is an investigative journalist. She has won awards for her reporting on women’s rights in the Middle East, Saudi Arabian dissidents and California’s lettuce industry. She started her career covering crime and agribusiness at daily newspapers in California, and then reported from Syria as a freelance journalist before the war, including investigating the 2005 suicide bombing in Amman that killed members of her family. She served most recently as senior investigations editor at Middle East Eye.
This article is from Declassified UK.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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