LONDON: Four pro-Palestinian protesters were held in custody Thursday after their first appearance in a London court on charges they damaged two Royal Air Force planes with red paint and crowbars.
The charges come after the group Palestine Action said two of its members entered RAF Brize Norton on June 20 and used electric scooters to approach two Voyager jets used for air-to-air refueling. The protesters used repurposed fire extinguishers to spray paint into the planes’ jet engines and caused further damage with crowbars, according to the group, which released video footage of the incident.
The four, all between the ages of 22 and 35, are charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage and conspiracy to enter a prohibited place for purposes prejudicial to the interests of the U.K., counterterror police said in a statement. The Crown Prosecution Service will argue that the offenses have a “terrorist connection,” police said.
The group did not enter pleas in Westminster Magistrates’ Court. They were scheduled to appear July 18 at the Central Criminal Court.
Palestine Action has claimed responsibility for a series of incidents targeting Israeli defense contractors in the U.K. and other sites linked to the war in Gaza.
Following the incident at RAF Brize Norton, the government introduced legislation to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. The measure, being debated in Parliament, would make it a criminal offense to belong to or support the group, with a maximum of 14 years in prison.
Palestine Action said its protests are designed to end international support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Planes from Brize Norton, 70 miles (112 kilometers) northwest of London, regularly fly to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, Britain’s main air base for operations in the Middle East.
Pro-Palestinian activists held in custody over UK air base vandalism
https://arab.news/jzhz3
Pro-Palestinian activists held in custody over UK air base vandalism
- British lawmakers voted on Wednesday to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist organization
- Four protesters charged with damaging two Royal Air Force planes with red paint and crowbars
Germany blames Russia for cyberattack on air safety, election interference
- “We have been able to clearly identify the handwriting behind it and prove Moscow’s responsibility,” said the spokesman
- “Our intelligence findings prove that the Russian military intelligence service GRU bears responsibility for this attack“
BERLIN: Germany on Friday accused Russia of a cyberattack targeting its air traffic control and spreading disinformation ahead of February’s general election, charges dismissed by Russia as “absurd” and “baseless.”
A German foreign ministry spokesman said security services had proof that hacker groups run by Russia’s military intelligence service GRU were responsible for the attack and influence operations.
“Based on comprehensive analysis by the German intelligence services, we have been able to clearly identify the handwriting behind it and prove Moscow’s responsibility,” said the spokesman.
“We can now clearly attribute the cyberattack against German Air Safety in August 2024 to the hacker collective APT28, also known as Fancy Bear,” he told a regular press briefing.
“Our intelligence findings prove that the Russian military intelligence service GRU bears responsibility for this attack,” added the spokesman.
He also said Russia had sought to influence February’s parliamentary election, which was won by the conservatives of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with the far-right AfD scoring its best-ever result in second place.
“Second, we can now state definitively that Russia, through the Storm 1516 campaign, sought to influence and destabilize the most recent federal election,” he added at a press conference.
The spokesman said a GRU-supported Moscow think tank and other groups had spread artificially generated or deepfake images and other content, and that the goal was to divide society and “undermine trust in democratic institutions.”
The Russian embassy in Berlin said in a statement sent to AFP that it “categorically rejected” that Russia was behind any of the activity.
“The accusations of Russian state structures’ involvement in these incidents and in the activities of hacker groups in general are baseless, unfounded and absurd,” the statement said.
According to security sources, much of the material spread by the Storm 1516 campaign involved spurious claims about Merz and other prominent politicians such as former foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and former vice chancellor Robert Habeck, both prominent Greens party members.
AFP’s German Fact Check service debunked two of the other claims in the campaign aimed at subverting trust in elections; namely that the AfD had been left off ballots in the city of Leipzig and that votes for the party in Hamburg were destroyed before they could be counted.
- ‘Pay a price’ -
The foreign ministry spokesman said Germany had “absolutely solid proof” that Russia was behind the operations but added that he could not go into detail because this would involve discussing the work of German intelligence services.
The head of the BfV domestic intelligence agency Sinan Selen said in a statement that “the ‘Storm-1516’ campaign shows in a very concrete way how our democratic order is being attacked.”
“This disinformation ecosystem includes pro-Russian influencers with a wide reach, conspiracy theories and right-wing extremist circles,” Selen said.
The German foreign ministry spokesman warned that Berlin would take “a series of countermeasures to make Russia pay a price for its hybrid actions, in close coordination with our European partners.”
Germany would support “new individual sanctions against hybrid actors on a European level,” he said, without saying who they were.
He added that from January, EU countries would “monitor cross-border travel by Russian diplomats within the Schengen Area. The aim is to facilitate better information exchange and minimize intelligence risks.”
Governments across Europe are on high alert over alleged Russian espionage, drone surveillance and sabotage activities, as well as cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns.
Germany has been Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of aid since Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion and has accused Moscow of being behind drone flights near several European airports in recent months.
