Police are looking for four people alleged to have shown support for terrorism, including a man who held a placard declaring full support for Hamas, and three women alleged to have brandished photos of paragliders, which may be a reference to those that were used to attack Israel.
The Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command issued photos of the suspects and said hate crimes continued to increase. Another big pro-Palestinian demonstration through central London is scheduled for Saturday.
Police said the man with the Hamas placard, written in pen on brown cardboard, was pictured at a demonstration on Saturday 21 October in Bond Street, central London. It read: “I fully support Hamas.”. The group is proscribed under terrorism legislation in the UK and was responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust in the 7 October attack on Israel that left 1,400 dead.
As part of the massacres, Hamas used paragliders to get some of its gunmen into Israel from Gaza. Police say on 21 October, in Whitehall, three women were pictured with photos of paragliders. Two wore them on their person and one held a placard.
Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met’s counter-terrorism command, said officers had been unable to track down the suspects. “Detectives have carried out numerous inquiries to identify these people and we are now asking the public to take a good look at these images and tell us if they know who these people are,” he said.
“I would stress that we want to speak to these people to help us with our inquiries, and in fact, I would urge them to get in touch with us directly.”
Police said hate crimes against Jewish communities in London were exponentially higher than at this time last year, having risen 14-fold. The Met has recorded 408 alleged antisemitic offences in October, compared with 28 in the same period in 2022.
Anti-Muslim crimes more than doubled year on year, with 174 alleged offences reported in October compared with 65 last year.
The Community Security Trust, which fights antisemitism, said recent examples included a Jewish man on the London underground facing shouts of “Kill him” and a woman in a shop shouting “Yahud” – Arabic for Jews – at a man who was shopping.
As Israel faces claims that its attacks against Gaza have broken international law, Murphy said police would consider complaints of alleged war crimes for which there is universal jurisdiction. “If we receive war crimes referrals, each of them will be dealt with on their own merits and will be accepted as a referral that we will follow through the process which is well publicised,” he said.
In the past, protesters have attempted to have arrest warrants issued against senior Israeli military or political figures on visits to the UK.
The Met was criticised for not making arrests after “jihad” was shouted at a fundamentalist protest last weekend. The force assessed that use of the term did not break the law, although some ministers appeared to be critical of the police stance.
Commander Kyle Gordon said that if “jihad” was shouted “specifically against Israel”, then officers would intervene. That would be a much clearer-cut example than the one that led to controversy last Sunday and Monday.
