Palestine Action defendant wounded by taser and sledgehammer in raid, court hears
A Palestine Action defendant was left with multiple wounds and bruises caused by blows from a sledgehammer and a police officer’s taser, an English court heard on Thursday.
A medical report recorded that Leona Kamio, a 30-year-old nursery school teacher, had taser wounds to her right arm and right hip, a bruise to the chin, a small scratch and another wound caused by a sledgehammer to the right hand after being arrested at an Israeli-owned arms factory.
Kamio, along with fellow defendants Charlotte Head, 29, Jordan Devlin, 31, Fatema Rajwani, 21, Zoe Rogers, 22, and Samuel Corner, 23, faces charges of criminal damage in connection with a break-in to a factory owned by Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems at Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024.
Corner additionally faces a charge of causing grievous bodily harm with intent for allegedly striking a police officer with a sledgehammer.
Footage shown in London’s Woolwich Crown Court on Thursday showed police officer Peter Adams pulling his taser out, raising it at Kamio and shouting at her and fellow defendant Zoe Rogers during the factory raid.
The court heard that Kamio was tackled to the ground by Adams after being tasered, hit her chin on the floor and then went rigid.
Being tasered felt “not good, very painful”, Kamio said. She told the court that her arm was twisted round, and that Adams tried to “drag me up by my wrist” while she was screaming.
Body-worn footage from PC Adams showed Kamio shouting “you’re fucking hitting me” as he tried to handcuff her. She goes on to call the police officer an “idiot”. “Your mate’s just hit us with a hammer, I think you’re the idiot,” Adams says in the footage.
Kamio said she did not know who caused the sledgehammer wound.
'I was scared'
Kamio was testifying in court on Thursday afternoon, after Corner had finished being cross-examined in the morning.
The court was shown footage of confrontations between the defendants and three security guards – Nigel Shaw, Patrick Luke and Angelo Volante – and then with police officers, including Adams, PC Aaron Buxton and Sergeant Kate Evans.
The footage, which Corner accepted, showed the 23-year-old Oxford graduate hitting Evans twice with a sledgehammer. Corner said that at the time, Buxton had sprayed him with Pava, a synthetic pepper spray.
The spray, which is an incapacitant, had an “all consuming” effect on Corner, he told the court. “It stings, burns and is all consuming. It’s hard to focus on anything else.” It made it very hard for him to see, he said.
Corner told the court he didn’t initially realise Evans or Buxton were police officers and thought they were “crazy security guards”.
“I was scared about what they were going to do to us, especially the women,” he said. While he said he thought the security guards bore some responsibility for Elbit’s business, he said his main concern was that they were “a real threat to all of us”.
Footage showed Devlin, Corner’s fellow defendant, struggling with Volante and then with Buxton, the police officer.
Footage showed Corner raising his sledgehammer and bringing it down onto PC Buxton twice. Asked if he hit Buxton with the sledgehammer, Corner said he didn’t know. “I don’t remember this,” he said.
'If I had thought about what it was going to do to her, I agree it would have been unreasonable'
– Samuel Corner, defendant
Corner agreed that he had raised his sledgehammer while approaching Evans, the police sergeant, who was on the ground. He struck her twice with the sledgehammer.
Corner said he thought a woman, one of his fellow activists – he later realised it was Rogers – was under attack because he could hear her screaming. He told the court that he believed that what he could see at the time was consistent with a “burly security guard” attacking his friend.
Now, Corner told the court, he accepted that it was not a burly security guard but a “female police officer”, and that she was not attacking Rogers. Corner said he did not intend to cause Evans serious harm. Asked if he thought Evans was “fair game”, Corner said he did not.
Asked if he thought it was “completely unreasonable” to hit Evans with a sledgehammer, he said “it seemed reasonable to do something and I had to act quite quickly”.
“If I had thought about what it was going to do to her, I agree it would have been unreasonable,” Corner agreed, when asked again.
“I genuinely didn’t,” he said, when asked by Prosecutor Deanna Heer KC if he knew what kind of harm he could have caused Evans.
The court heard character references for Corner, who is autistic and has an ADHD diagnosis, from his grandfather, a close friend, and his romantic partner of almost two years.
They spoke of a “gentle, compassionate person” who had helped fellow prisoners improve their language skills and who had an “unwavering sense of justice”.
“He finds any form of violence abhorrent,” Corner’s grandfather said of him.
'What we were doing was necessary'
Kamio, who is from Swansea in south Wales, told the court that she joined Palestine Action after getting an email in March 2024, in which the direct action group talked about forcing the shutdown of an Elbit factory in Tamworth, Staffordshire.
Soon after, she was added to a group on Signal, the messaging app, to arrange the raid on Elbit’s Filton factory, which was described as the arms company’s “most important site in the UK”, having been opened in July 2023 by the Israeli ambassador to the UK.
Kamio told the court that the activists’ aim was to stay inside the factory for as long as possible in order to destroy as many weapons as possible. “We kept being told the security won’t come in,” she said.
But security guard Nigel Shaw had “come in in the first five minutes, which really spooked us,” Kamio told the court.
“He looked so angry. Everything about his body language and face was just rage. He was charging towards us,” Kamio said of Shaw, who she believed was holding his umbrella in a position to hurt her.
“I shouted ‘fuck off’ really loudly,” she said. “I have obviously watched this footage a lot and I really don’t like how I come across because it’s not what I’m like,” Kamio told the court.
Kamio told Shaw that this was “above your paygrade”, meaning that it wasn’t his job to try to stop the activists, that this was a job for the police. Shaw then said he was concussed, which confused Kamio, who then realised he was bleeding a little bit.
'Everything about his [the security guard's] body language and face was just rage. He was charging towards us'
– Leona Kamio, defendant
“I still felt like what we were doing was necessary,” Kamio told the court. “I came here [to the Elbit factory] to do something to stop people from suffering. Working with children, I would put one of their lives before any property.”
Volante, the security guard, was “so unpredictable”, Kamio said. She told the court she saw him swinging angle grinders around. Footage showed the security guard with an angle grinder in one hand and a hammer in another.
Kamio described the security guards as seeming to be violent. “I panicked because I’m at Elbit, this is a very evil company, the people that work there describe themselves as being the backbone of the Israeli military,” she said.
She told the court she did not intend to hurt anyone with the sledgehammer she had, which was then grabbed out of her hand.
Kamio told the court that she was not trying to resist arrest by Adams. Her screams were not fake, she said. “I failed drama,” she told the court.
Her employer at the nursery school she works at said in a character reference read in court that Kamio’s absence had “upset and confused” the children. “I cannot imagine her ever hurting anyone,” the employer said.
The case continues.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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