Samuel Corner has been jailed for seven years and eight months after a court found a terrorist connection to the 2024 break-in at Elbit Systems UK’s site in Gloucestershire. He was also convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent after striking Sgt Kate Evans with a sledgehammer during the raid.
The sentence, handed down on Friday, is the longest imposed in the case and means Corner, Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio and Fatema Rajwani will each serve an extra year on licence and face 15 years of terrorist notification requirements. The judge’s finding gives the case its sharpest edge: a factory break-in that ended not only in prison terms, but in terrorism-related obligations usually reserved for far graver conduct.
A report relied on by the prosecution said the raid caused £1.2m of damage, including harm to 41 military assets. In court, Mr Justice Johnson said the defendants took part in a carefully planned and highly sophisticated attack, and that the offending was designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public while advancing a political or ideological cause. He also said Corner had shown no remorse and had used extreme and gratuitous force against a vulnerable police officer acting in the course of her duties.
The raid was part of a Palestine Action protest against an Israeli arms manufacturer’s UK factory, and the sentencing turned on whether that conduct crossed the line from protest into terrorism-linked crime. Johnson said the fact the defendants believed they were trying to shut down a company they thought was acting unlawfully did not reduce the seriousness of the offence. That finding mattered because the court accepted a terrorist connection under section 69 of the Sentencing Act, even though the defendants were not convicted of terrorism offences themselves.
That is where the arguments split hardest. Representing Head, Rajiv Menon KC called the prosecution’s move an invitation to chilling, creeping authoritarianism that undermined the very fabric of society. For Kamio, Mira Hammad KC said the crown had chosen not to put a terrorism case to a jury and should not be allowed to use section 69 as a way to increase punishment for the same conduct. Corner’s lawyer, Tom Wainwright KC, argued it was wrong for someone to be sentenced for a more serious offence they had not been convicted of, while also saying the activists believed they were acting because people in Gaza were being killed.
The court’s outcome leaves the four defendants facing long custodial terms and a decade and a half of terrorism notification requirements on top of their sentences. For Corner, the penalty now reaches beyond the assault on Sgt Evans and the damage inside the Gloucestershire factory to a legal finding that will follow him long after he leaves prison.
