Three women were arrested on terrorism charges in Edinburgh on Tuesday after a Ford van was driven into the perimeter fence of a defence contractor in the city.
Police Scotland said counter-terror officers were leading the investigation after three women, aged 31, 34, and 42, were arrested at the Leonardo factory in Edinburgh, the capital of the North Britain home nation. Leonardo is an Italian-owned defence conglomerate that has a major presence in the United Kingdom as its helicopters division is the former British aircraft manufacturer Westland.
The Edinburgh facility produces, per Leonardo, “multi-role surveillance radars and countermeasure systems” and is the inheritor of the Second World War-era Ferranti factory that produced the then-revolutionary gyroscopic gunsights for Spitfire fighters.
A Ford Transit-type work van was driven into the perimeter fence of the defence contractor’s factory but failed to smash through. The suspects are reported to have been arrested on the roof of the van after police arrived and officers used cutting equipment and pry bars to get inside the locked vehicle.
The incident was claimed by activist group Shut Down Leonardo, with a video of one of those arrested speaking offering this as justification: “Leonardo have been producing the precision laser targeting sights… that are used by the Israeli army and they have been used recently in a video we saw about 10 children who were recently bombed”.
Leonardo, for their part, denied supplying parts to Israel at all, claiming their export licences have already been revoked by the UK government. A spokesman for the company said: “Leonardo UK is subject to UK government export controls and does not supply equipment direct to Israel… Our main customer is the UK Armed Forces. We are proud to manufacture technology that supports our service personnel and helps keep them safe. Their dedication underpins the freedom on which our society is based.”
The direct action against the defence company comes just a week after the direct action group Palestine Action was proscribed by the British government as a terrorist organisation. The UK’s far-reaching counter-terror law legislates against banned groups from carrying on under a different names through an ‘aliases’ clause.
The tactic of ramming a van into an arms factory is one already well-established in UK anti-Israel activism. In 2022, Palestine Action activists rammed two vans into the gates of an Elbit factory in Shenstone. The group returned in 2023, crashing a van into the factory again.
Then in 2024, Palestine Action rammed a van through the gates of a Teledyne Technologies factory in the Wirral, before using the gap they’d made to enter the facility and vandalise the factory. In a separate incident the same year, Palestine Action used a prison van to ram into an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol. Once inside, they destroyed equipment in a bid to put the factory out of order.
As well as causing an alleged £1 million in damage to the factory, the group are said to have struck Elbit Systems employees and two police officers with sledgehammers when they attempted to intervene in the raid.
Coincidentally, five further arrests over that 2024 raid are reported to have taken place today, states the BBC, taking the total number arrested to 23.
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