Four Palestine Action activists were jailed on Friday after a 2024 break-in at Elbit Systems UK’s factory in Gloucestershire, with a judge finding their offending had a terrorist connection. Charlotte Head and Leona Kamio each received five years, Fatema Rajwani got four years and eight months, and Samuel Corner was sentenced to seven years and eight months.
The hearing put hard numbers on the scale of the raid. Prosecutors said the damage came to £1.2m and included 41 military assets, with £395,056 attributed to six units in an unnamed drone system. Corner’s sentence was the heaviest of the four because he was also convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent after striking Sgt Kate Evans with a sledgehammer.
The case matters because the judge did more than punish criminal damage. Mr Justice Johnson said the break-in was a carefully planned and highly sophisticated attack, designed to intimidate the UK government and a section of the public and carried out for the purpose of advancing a political or ideological cause. That finding brought 15 years of terrorist notification requirements for each defendant, along with an extra year on licence after prison, even though the convictions were for criminal damage rather than terrorism charges.
That is the point of friction in the case, and it was argued openly in court. Rajiv Menon KC said it was unprecedented for the prosecution to ask a judge to sentence a defendant as a terrorist for a non-violent offence. Mira Hammad KC said the defendants had initially been arrested on suspicion of terrorism but were not charged with those offences, while Tom Wainwright KC warned that a terrorist-connection finding would go far beyond this case and was wrong for someone to be sentenced for a more serious offence of which they had not been convicted.
Mr Justice Johnson rejected the argument that the defendants were somehow less culpable because they said they were trying to shut down a company they believed was acting unlawfully. His conclusion leaves the four women and Corner facing not just long prison terms but a decade and a half of post-release monitoring usually associated with terrorism cases, a consequence that is likely to shape how future protest prosecutions are argued and contested.
