A man has been arrested on suspicion of publishing a message on social media in which he threatened to shoot Nigel Farage.<\/p>\n
The Metropolitan police arrested a man in his 20s on Tuesday after the post was reported to them by the parliamentary authorities in May.<\/p>\n
Farage has claimed the police have not taken death threats against MPs seriously enough and has called for more money to be spent on security for politicians.<\/p>\n
Ann Widdecombe, a former MP and Reform UK spokesperson, was killed last week, with police looking into possible leftwing political motives for the attack.<\/p>\n
In the past, several people have been convicted for sending threats to kill or rape MPs including Stella Creasy, Jess Asato, Jess Phillips and Ed Miliband. Last year, an Afghan man who had entered the UK on a small boat was found guilty of threatening to kill Farage in a TikTok video.<\/p>\n
A Met spokesperson said: \u201cOn Tuesday 14 July a man in his 20s was arrested by Met officers on suspicion of sending threatening communications to a member of parliament.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe arrest relates to a social media post from earlier this year, which was reported to police on Friday 8 May. After receiving the report, detectives submitted an application to a social media platform to gain access to the user\u2019s contact information.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the relevant information was returned to detectives the man was arrested, with support from local Met officers, at a residential address in south London. After being held in police custody overnight, he has since been bailed pending further inquiries.\u201d<\/p>\n
The post on X, made at the time of the May elections, read: \u201cI am going to shoot you in the head if you win.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farage told the Telegraph: \u201cThis is the first time the police have ever proactively acted on a social media post, and I hope they are looking at the other three or four hundred similar posts from this year alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis has been going on for years \u2013 not just words but videos of people firing guns and so on, and in the past we have put multiple reports in to the police, always to be told that these social media posts don\u2019t meet the threshold, which is extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier on Wednesday, Zia Yusuf, Reform UK\u2019s home affairs spokesperson, said there was an \u201coverwhelming sense of fear amongst the Reform MPs\u201d after Widdecombe\u2019s killing.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cIn terms of the current situation with state protection for Reform MPs, there has been some movement in the very near past. I\u2019m not going to comment on that but suffice to say, I think, particularly in light of new information, I\u2019m pleased to say the threats are being taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man has been arrested on suspicion of publishing a message on social media in which he threatened…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-693365","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\/693365","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=693365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}