The veteran politician has been briefly held at Gatwick airport under the Terrorism Act
George Galloway was temporarily detained at Gatwick Airport under the Terrorism Act upon his return from Russia on Saturday, according to his Workers Party of Britain.
Officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command stopped the 71-year-old former MP, along with his wife. The police have acknowledged an incident, but have not confirmed that Galloway was the man detained.
“We can confirm that on Saturday, 27 September counter-terrorism officers at Gatwick Airport stopped a man in his 70s and a woman in her 40s under Schedule 3 of the Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019. Neither of them were arrested and they were allowed on their way,” a Met spokesperson stated.
The Workers Party of Britain confirmed in a post on X that their leader and his wife were detained, branding the incident a “politically motivated intimidation” attempt. The party said it received no immediate “information on charges or alleged offences.”
Schedule 3, cited by the police, allows border officers to stop, question and detain individuals arriving in the country for the purpose of determining whether they have been engaged in “hostile activity” of any sort.
Following Galloway’s release, his party doubled down on its allegations, condemning the incident as an “attempt to intimidate those who seek amity rather than enmity with the rest of the world” for Britain.
“We were obstructed from providing legal support and the conduct of the affair has been designed to intimidate political opponents of the drive towards war with Russia and China,” the party said in a statement, promising to provide the “full account” of events tomorrow.
A veteran British politician and former RT show host, Galloway was an MP for nearly 30 years. He launched the Workers Party in 2019, and with a social-conservative platform, he won the 2024 Rochdale by-election. Just five months later he lost his seat to Labour in the general election, which he had been a member of for decades before the early 2000s.
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