I’ve been thinking for a while about whether to make this post. Having at least to some extent learnt my trade as a journalist I only like to post either about things I know from direct, first-hand experience, or that I can at least in some way verify sources. In this case I have to start with the warning that I haven’t been able to do so in any way; although I’ve found the story mentioned in several different places, none of them does more than to refer back to the original anonymous blog posting, made in August last year.
About all I can tell you about the author of this chilling story is that according to the blog he is a young Asian man with an interest in replica arms who lives somewhere in south London with his parents, not far from Wimbledon station.
And one who claims to have been arrested by police in central London at gunpoint for taking photos, later being told by the officer who apprehended him he was lucky that he hadn’t been executed on the spot. His is a story you need to read.
On his blog, HM Ministry of Paranoia (HM MoP), he tells how he was arrested while walking through tourist London with a Nikon D300 and a tube map for “Suspicion of a Section 58 – Possessing information likely to be of use to terrorists.”
Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 states:
(1) A person commits an offence if
(a) he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or
(b) he possesses a document or record containing information of that kind.
(2) In this section “record” includes a photographic or electronic record.
It is a defence to this charge to show a “reasonable excuse” for possessing possessing or making the record, though there has been considerable dispute about what this means. You can read more about this in yesterday’s report in The Times Online of yesterday’s judgement in the House of Lords on the case of Regina v G and J., two men charged under this section of the act whose cases have resulted in appeals, eventually to the Law Lords, whose judgement I find hard to follow. Probably it is because of this case that the story on HMMoP, originally posted in August 2008, has emerged again.
On HM MoP, just before he was finally released uncharged, the man was told by the armed officer who had arrested him “Had you not have been soo compliant, I would have shot you, and you would have died“. He writes ‘I asked him what did I do wrong, he said “Look, lets face it, suicide bombers are Asian. If I had a choice between you and him (pointing to a white colleage), id shoot you every time”. ‘(sic)
The story illustrates graphically the gulf between the laws that are debated in Parliament (where civil liberties are at least given lip-service) and the way in which they are interpreted on the ground by police. Although we may suspect that the way the police carry them out is perhaps rather closer to the kind ideas that the bully-boys in New Labour’s back rooms would like (have you watched the preview clip of Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop?)
As I said at the start I don’t know anything more about this case than appears on the pages of HM MoP, and it would be fair to record that in its pages one policeman – the Insepector at Wimbledon Police Station where the man went to hand in his replica guns as ordered to do by the Special Branch officers – did his job properly. But is it just my paranoia that leads me to wonder just why the last post on the HM MoP was made on October 10, 2008 and to wonder why this man is no longer blogging?
And of course, you’ll know why if >Re:PHOTO should suddenly stop posting or disappear from the web or even stop in the middle of