A group of 86 protesters who allegedly breached prison grounds at west London’s Wormwood Scrubs jail have been arrested, the Metropolitan Police said.<\/p>\n
The force said the group were “protesting in support of a Palestine Action prisoner on a hunger strike”, and allegedly threatened police and stopped prison staff from entering and exiting.<\/p>\n
The Prisoners for Palestine campaign group identified the inmate as Muhammad Umer Khalid, 22, who they say began a thirst strike on Friday. He is awaiting trial over a break-in at RAF Brize Norton last June. He denies the charges.<\/p>\n
All those involved will be arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass after refusing to leave.<\/p>\n
“A number managed to get inside a staff entrance area of a prison building,” the Met said.<\/p>\n
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said that “at no point was prison security compromised” and called the action an “escalation” that was “completely unacceptable”.<\/p>\n
“While we support the right to peacefully protest, reports of trespassing and threats being made to staff and police officers are deeply concerning,” they said.<\/p>\n
Prisoners for Palestine accused the police of carrying out a “violent and wildly disproportionate response” to the protest.<\/p>\n
The group said Khalid has limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition, and was on an “extremely dangerous” thirst strike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of 86 protesters who allegedly breached prison grounds at west London’s Wormwood Scrubs jail have been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389884,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-389883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}