A 38-year-old man has been charged with criminal damage after Winston Churchill\u2019s statue outside the Houses of Parliament was sprayed with graffiti labelling the former prime minister a \u201cZionist war criminal\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Metropolitan police arrested Caspar San Giorgio, of no fixed address, shortly after 4am on Friday. He was charged in the early hours of Saturday morning and is due to appear at Highbury Corner magistrates court in London.<\/p>\n
Phrases including \u201cstop the genocide\u201d and \u201cfree Palestine\u201d were also sprayed in red paint on the bronze sculpture in Parliament Square, central London. Other graffiti read \u201cnever again is now\u201d and \u201cglobalise the intifada\u201d.<\/p>\n
Last December, the Met and Greater Manchester police said that anyone chanting the slogan \u201cglobalise the intifada\u201d would face arrest. San Giorgio has been charged with criminal damage.<\/p>\n
The decision by the two police forces came after two terror attacks: at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester in October last year, and at Bondi Beach in Australia in December.<\/p>\n
The statue was cordoned off after the attack and cleaned on Friday morning.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the incident, a Greater London Authority spokesperson said: \u201cWe are appalled by this vandalism to the statue of Sir Winston Churchill and work is under way to remove the graffiti as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Downing Street also said the apparent vandalism of the statue was \u201ccompletely abhorrent\u201d.<\/p>\n
A No 10 spokesperson said: \u201cChurchill was a great Briton. This government will always stand up for our values and the perpetrator must be held to account.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chruchill\u2019s statue has been vandalised several times in the past, including during protests. Graffiti accusing Churchill of being a racist was written on the statue in June 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest triggered by the death of George Floyd in the US.<\/p>\n
Later that year, in October, an Extinction Rebellion activist was ordered to pay more than \u00a31,500 after defacing the statue by painting \u201cracist\u201d on its plinth during a climate protest.<\/p>\n
The 3.6-metre monument, created by Ivor Roberts-Jones, was unveiled in 1973 by the former prime minister\u2019s wife, Clementine Churchill. It is one of 12 statues on or around Parliament Square, most of well-known statesmen, including Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 38-year-old man has been charged with criminal damage after Winston Churchill\u2019s statue outside the Houses of Parliament…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-450589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450589","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=450589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}