Two of five men accused of inciting racial hatred after plastering offensive stickers across a university campus posed for a photograph giving a Nazi salute, a court has heard.
Prosecutors said “threatening, abusive or at very least insulting” stickers stuck to signs at Aston University, Birmingham, were “recruitment tools” for the neo-Nazi National Action group.
One of the stickers showed a white figure giving a Nazi salute, and stated: “White Zone – National Action”. Another read: “Britain is ours – the rest must go.”
The men are accused of putting up the stickers on the afternoon of 9 July 2016. Jurors saw university CCTV footage allegedly showing the men on campus that day.
An image showed some of the group posing in front of the university with the National Action flag, and two of them giving Nazi salutes.
Jurors were told they would see evidence of planning, including messages and a downloaded map of the campus.
Opening the prosecution on Thursday, Kelly Brocklehurst said the defendants accepted they put the stickers up, but did not accept that they had incited racial hatred.
“When you are faced with something that says White Zone and the image of somebody with a raised right arm, stickers with swastikas, we say: how can that not be threatening, abusive or at very least insulting?” the barrister said. “That is exactly the aim, or one of the aims, of what these defendants were seeking to achieve.”
He told the jury: “There’s likely no dispute about what they did, the dispute is likely about why they did it. But we say you can be, and will be, sure they intended racial hatred, and if not they were well aware of what those stickers were capable of achieving.”
The defendants, who are all said to have been members of National Action at the time, are: Chad Williams-Allen, 26, Dean Lloyd, 27, both of West Bromwich, and Garry Jack, 22, of Birmingham. Two other men cannot be named for legal reasons.
The jury was shown messages from 2 March 2016 in which Williams-Allen allegedly sent an image of a National Action sticker, and said: “Been taking the long route home through paki land and slapping these everywhere.”
Another defendant, also 26, had images on electronic devices seized by police which allegedly said “Hitler was right” and “bring back apartheid”.
The trial, expected to last up to three weeks, continues.
