Imprisoned for protesting

It was 6am on 19^th November 2024 and 27-year-old Kamran Ahmed was trying to talk himself out of bed.

He had a car to fix before taking his dad to a hospital appointment. It was freezing cold and the enveloping duvet was winning the battle. From nowhere, the sound of someone smashing in the front door exploded the silence.

“I was thinking this person’s really cheeky, robbing the house in actual daylight,” Kamran says. Then he heard it: ​“Police, don’t move”.

“Time slows down in the moment,” he continues. ​“I just went back under my blanket. I knew it was gonna be a long day.”

Kamran was one of eight people arrested that day by counterterrorrism police for their alleged roles in a break-in at an Elbit Systems weapons factory in Filton, Gloucestershire, in August last year. Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, providing up to 85 per cent of land-based equipment procured by the Israeli military and about 85 per cent of its drones. They were charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder for allegedly driving into the doors of the building and damaging property estimated to be worth in excess of £1 million. There are now a total of 24 activists who have been arrested for the action that day, dubbed the Filton 24.

Kamran was part of a third wave of arrests for the incident, so he had some idea of what might be coming his way. But he explains that nothing can fully prepare you for what he estimates to be 30 armed men with riot shields raiding the house you share with your parents at dawn.

He was held for five nights at Newbury Police Station before being refused bail and transferred to HMP Thameside, where he spent the next few months on remand. He was then moved to HMP Pentonville, where he has been locked up since.

“You know when you’re younger and you go on a school trip?” Kamran says, trying to put into words how he felt on the first night in jail. ​“You’re on the coach back to school and you suddenly feel a bit empty. You just wanna be home.”

The concept of a ​“political prisoner” feels like something of an anachronism. As pointed out by former UN special rapporteur Michel Forst during a visit to the UK last year, ​“It had been almost unheard of since the 1930s for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK.” But according to Naila Ahmed, head of campaigns at CAGE International, which has been supporting and advising the Filton 24 campaign since the first arrests: ​“there are 32 political prisoners in Britain accused of disrupting the supply of weapons to be used in the genocide in Gaza.” These include the Filton 24 – minus Sean Middlesbrough who absconded in October, having been granted a four day conditional release to attend his brother’s wedding – plus five linked to the plane spray-painting at RAF base Brize Norton, and four for alleged property damage at defense manufacturer Moog Inc in Wolverhampton.

It follows a raft of new legislations brought in as a response to the Extinction Rebellion era, which saw climate activists engaging in ever-increasingly imaginative acts of civil disobedience in an attempt to raise awareness of the climate emergency. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022 and the subsequent Public Order Act 2023 introduced new specific offences – like locking on (attaching yourself to something) or obstructing transport – and increased penalties for protest-related activities; setting the wheels in motion for the peak in imprisoned activists we see today.

“You’re less likely to be beaten up by police if you’re an activist in the UK than you are in say, France,” says Oscar Berglund, a critical political economist at the University of Bristol. ​“But you’re more likely to end up in prison.”

On September 27^th 2024, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were convicted of criminal damage and sentenced to two years and 20 months respectively for their parts in a soup throwing action for Just Stop Oil. This is despite the fact that the painting – Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers – was protected by a thick pane of glass and the estimated cost to the gallery was £150.

It felt like a long sentence at the time; the crescendo of a swathe of convictions that saw many activists serving jail time, including Just Stop Oil founder, Roger Hallam, who was sentenced to five years (reduced to four in March this year) for participating in a Zoom call planning road block protests on the M25. Having peaked at 26 in August last year, all Just Stop Oil prisoners have now been released on licence. But many are still subjected to intensely restrictive licence conditions.

And the goalposts continue to shift. There’s a sizeable public understanding around the proscription (or banning) of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. This is largely thanks to campaign group Defend Our Juries, who have organised a robust and on-going campaign of demonstrations that has included many pensioners. But there’s less known about the direct actionists arrested under counter-terror powers prior to the proscription, despite having no terror-related charges brought against them to this day.

Under the umbrella of Prevent – the government’s anti-terror strategy, first introduced in 2007 and made a statutory duty for UK institutions with the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 – police and prison authorities have been empowered to enact harsher measures on the Filton 24.

Many arrestees have been placed in incommunicado detention – refused contact with legal counsel or loved ones and intensely interrogated for up to 36 hours – something that UN Special Rapporteurs have described as constituting ​“enforced disappearance”. Their prison rights have been heavily curtailed. The majority are expected to be incarcerated for close to two years on remand before ever seeing their case go to trial. Kamran’s trial is scheduled for June 2026. The standard legal limit on being held without trial is six months.

Kamran’s sister, Shams, and I sit chatting and snacking on apple slices in their East Ham family home, waiting to speak to him. Prison life can be chaotic, she apologises. He’ll call as soon as he can.

Talking directly to any of the prisoners with Palestine-related charges is close to impossible. In theory, they are permitted to communicate with press, but in practice it is very different. Various friends and family of the Filton 24 explain that they have calls cut on a regular basis and are nervous about repercussions from hostile guards who listen in. When Shams and I call, we avoid flaggable phrases such as ​“Palestine” and ​“terrorism”.

“What you sayin’ sis?” Kamran says when he calls about an hour later. HMP Pentonville is basically a holding pen, a remand institution where day-to-day life is transient. At numerous points across our two-hour chat it sounds like things are very much kicking off on the block. Kamran seems to have learned to zone it out.

He explains that it’s taken him a while to get there: ​“I was more negative when I first came to jail. I grew up in an area where there was a lot of gang culture, so initially you’re kind of jumpy.”

In remand there is no talk of rehabilitation. Prisoners are generally locked in their cells for 23 hours a day. Kamran gets a few extra hours out for his textiles workshop. ​“I signed up for barbering but the courses got cancelled,” he explains. ​“The funding’s not there. Because it’s a remand jail there’s not much going on in here”.

Before prison, Kamran was a car mechanic by trade. He’d quit his 9 – 5 at the RAC to focus on activism, fixing cars early mornings and late evenings to make ends meet.

“Islam teaches you patience,” he explains. ​“I’m here now, innit. Only God knows what’s good for you. You might actually hate something, but God loves it. You might love something, but God hates it. This situation – I might come out with a lot more than I’ve lost.”

Audrey Corno, 23, served two months on remand for her alleged part in occupying the rooftop of GRiD Defence Systems in High Wycombe, a military hardware manufacturer accused by Palestine Action of supplying for Elbit Systems. Prior to the act, she was in therapy for a traumatic incident in her personal life.

“The sessions very quickly turned to Gaza,” she recalls. ​“Big stuff was happening in my life but I didn’t feel able to focus on it. How could I care about that when I was watching entire neighbourhoods obliterated on my screen?”

Born and raised in Hong Kong, her first experience of activism was sneaking out of home to participate in the country’s 2019 democracy protests: ​“Being tear-gassed at 16 changes your brain chemistry,” she says. ​“It got me involved and wanting to use my body to do something.”

A month after turning 18 she moved to London to study dance education. She describes gaining an increased interest in Palestine that started around the time of the 2021 Gaza bombings; discussing intricacies with friends at the uni’s Palestine Society. Before long she was attending twice-weekly direct action workshops.

Audrey talks through her first action in April 2024: spraying red paint on the MoD headquarters in Whitehall. ​“As soon as I started spraying, all the anxiety left my body,” she says. ​“I think I was just scared about being caught or stopped before being able to start.”

A march accompanied the action, with people chanting support as arrests were made. ​“I love to watch videos of me with a Palestine flag, dancing in my cuffs,” she says. Audrey describes being held overnight at Hammersmith Police Station, singing Adele’s Someone Like You in her cell to expel the excess energy. The next day in court she was granted bail, with a hearing scheduled for July 2026.

Audrey knew that remand was unlikely for her first offence. But ​“it just wasn’t sitting right with me,” she says. ​“My intention was to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel … I started struggling with the fact that [the action] was purely symbolic. For me the success of an action is – how long have we put this factory out of commission for?” Her second action – the rooftop takeover – was almost certain to see her serving jail time.

“Yes, there’s an emotional preparation,” she explains. ​“But I kept coming back to the fact that [that] is just a fear of losing my privilege.”

Qesser Zuhrah, 20, was the youngest of the Filton 24, until her 19-year-old brother Salaam’s arrest as part of the final wave in July. ​“When you’re a prisoner for your cause, there’s an added layer of grief to your entire experience of imprisonment,” she says. ​“A genocide rages on and all we can do is sit in our cells and watch.”

Qesser was pulling an all-nighter to finish an assignment when, she estimates, 30 counterterrorism police raided her houseshare on the same morning as Kamran. A few days later, she sat behind double-paned glass as a judge denied her bail and placed her on remand in the adult wing at HMP Bronzefield.

We try and fail for months to get me added to her prison call list, settling on going through a friend who relays my questions and her answers back and forth.

“I still think about the moment they burst into my room tasked with catching a terrorist and saw this 19-year-old girl in her spinny chair,” she says. ​“I wonder if they thought at that moment, ​‘we’re doing something wrong.’”

She talks about joking around with the officers in the police car, asking them stupid questions and requesting help for the things she couldn’t do in handcuffs: ​“It was really funny. They just did all this to show how big and powerful they are. And there they were, scratching my nose!”

Audrey believes it’s this outspokenness that has prevented Qesser being moved to the youth wing, despite claiming to have made numerous requests and witnessed older activists being granted spots. ​“Everyone has different ways of dealing with the prison system,” says Audrey. ​“They’re picking on Qesser because she doesn’t take shit.”

CAGE’s Naila Ahmed runs through a roll-call of issues the prisoners have faced in jail. ​“They have had visits cancelled, letters from loved ones withheld and are denied jobs within the prison due to Prevent involvement,” she explains. ​“Muslim prisoners face institutional Islamophobia by being denied religious books, blocked from attending Friday prayers and facing taunts and abuse from guards.”

In a right to reply contained within a Novara Media exposé in March of this year, an HMP Bronzefield spokesperson said: ​“Whilst we cannot comment specifically on any individual, we strongly refute any such claims [of institutional Islamophobia] and are confident that all relevant legislation is being followed. Should any prisoner have a specific concern, there are numerous ways in which these can be raised.”

Since being released on bail, Audrey dedicates her time to representing the prisoners’ rights with Prisoners for Palestine. We speak one Monday when keffiyehs have been banned at HMP Bronzefield. ​“Every single one of [the Filton 24 inmates] had their cells searched. A lot of them had them taken out of their cells during their visits,” she explains. ​“Some were wearing the keffiyeh as a hijab on their head – they were threatened that it would be removed by force.”

It’s hard not to draw a link between the identity of the prisoners and their treatment by the system. ​“Being what I am – a young, South Asian immigrant Muslim girl – I have never had the option of being a stranger to struggle,” Qesser says. ​“I never had the option to disengage from politics.”

Activists are often split up in jail, but, where possible, they act as each other’s emotional support. Many have also found this from their non-activist inmates. Qesser describes entire landings chanting for them on the days when there are protests outside the prison.

And the support goes both ways. Kamran’s fellow inmates came to speak to him about a new young prisoner who kept robbing the cells. He was trying to stay under the radar and hold on to his spot at the textiles workshop, but he agreed to talk to the boy on his inmates’ behalf. ​“It didn’t go well. He broke my nose!” he laughs. ​“But he actually came and apologised. I don’t hate the guy, I just wanna see him as a better person.”

On 11^th November, Prisoners for Palestine announced that four of the Filton 24 and two of the Brize Norton 4 would be going on hunger strike. Their demands are: the shutdown of all Elbit sites and subsidiaries in the UK; bail for all Palestine Action prisoners; all relevant documents in their case be released; the de-proscription of Palestine Action; and an end to all prison censorship and withholding of letters, phone calls and books. This is already the largest coordinated prisoners’ hunger strike since the 1981 Irish hunger strike led by Bobby Sands and looks set only to increase as more prisoners plan to join.

Qesser and Kamran are two of the initial six. At the time of writing they have been on hunger strike for 34 days and 25 days respectively.

Shams texts to keep me updated on how Kamran and the family are doing: ​“I am run down to be honest,” she types. ​“He’s declining slowly and there are no meaningful conversations happening with the government in regards to the demands. Kams told us he will forever be on hunger strike unless we mobilise outside.”

November was a big month for the Filton 24. A three-day Judicial Review challenging the proscription of Palestine Action concluded on Tuesday. No date has yet been given for the handing down of a judgement.

Running concurrent to this, a 10-week trial for the first six arrestees began on 17^th November. Kamran had told me that he was looking forward to seeing the result; both in support of the other prisoners and as a clue to how he might fare at his own trial next June.

“When I first got arrested I was stressed out ​’cause I was thinking, ​“Oh, two years,’” he recalls. ​“I’m like, alright I can do two years, my friends will still remember me.” Since then his lawyers have warned him that he needs to get his head around the possibility of a 10 year sentence. ​“The moment you go inside you start thinking you’re on standstill and the world will just carry on without you,” he explains.

But he’s wrong there. Before Kamran was arrested he was the primary carer for his mother, who suffers from schizophrenia, and father, who has multiple health needs including diabetes, reduced mobility and vertigo. When I visit, they offer me dinner and thank me for sharing their son’s story.

Inside, the family home is immaculate, but the outside is strewn with miscellaneous car parts and oil streaks. The only time Shams cries as we chat is when she tells me that they’ve just lent Kamran’s ​“project car” to a friend; they felt guilty leaving it unused in the driveway. But everything else remains just so, waiting for the day he comes home.