Mon, Jul 25, 2022 page5

• Threat to Chinese embassy ‘fake retaliation’

  LONDON ARREST: An Australian activist said the e-mailed threat was meant to frame him after he staged a peaceful protest outside the UK office

  • The Guardian
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  Australian activist Drew Pavlou has been arrested in the UK over a false “bomb threat” delivered to the Chinese embassy in London that he claims came from a fake e-mail address designed to frame him.

  Pavlou said the “absurd” e-mail claimed he would blow up the embassy over Beijing’s oppression of its Uighur Muslim minority, but that it was fabricated by the embassy to have him arrested.

  Pavlou said he held a “small peaceful human rights protest” carrying a Uighur flag outside the Chinese embassy in central London, adding that the embassy reported him to police as a terrorist in retaliation.

  

  Protester Drew Pavlou holds a sign and wears a T-shirt reading: “Where is Peng Shuai” on day 12 of the Wimbledon Championships in London on July 8.

  Photo: AP

  The fake e-mail allegedly said: “This is Drew Pavlou, you have until 12pm to stop the Uighur genocide or I blow up the embassy with a bomb. Regards, Drew.”

  Pavlou, a longstanding and vociferous critic of Beijing’s oppression of China’s Uighur minority, said the email was allegedly sent from the account drewpavlou99@protonmail.me.

  The Metropolitan police confirmed it had received a report of a bomb threat made by e-mail, and had arrested a man outside the embassy because of his “suspicious behavior,” and that he had attempted to glue his hand to the embassy.

  Pavlou said the e-mail account is fake, and he had no involvement with it and had never sent any threat.

  “The UK police arrested me. They said the Chinese embassy had reported me as a terrorist, as a bomb threat. I was so shocked. I’ve always been a peaceful protester,” Pavlou said. “They’ve made up this e-mail claiming that I sent in the bomb threat. It’s just absolute insanity. Why would I throw away my life like that?”

  “I miss my family, I can’t leave the country, they’ve threatened to arrest me at the border,” he said. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I just wanted to peacefully protest and the Chinese embassy have invented this narrative that I’m a terrorist. It’s insanity.”

  Pavlou said online that he was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police Service and detained for 23 hours without access to a lawyer.

  “UK police handcuffed me in stress position and held me incommunicado for 23 hours with no access to lawyers. Facing seven years in prison,” he wrote on Twitter.

  “They wouldn’t let me talk to anyone on the outside, no one knew where I was,” he added.

  The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed Pavlou’s arrest.

  It “has offered consular assistance to Drew Pavlou, an Australian who was arrested, and subsequently released, in the United Kingdom,” the department said in a statement.

  Pavlou has consistently protested China’s authoritarian regime, in particular Beijing’s treatment of its Uighur Muslim minority.

  Last month, he was ejected from the Wimbledon’s men’s singles final after holding up a sign that said: “Where is Peng Shuai?”

  Shuai (彭帥) is a retired Chinese tennis player who alleged she had been sexually assaulted by a senior Chinese Communist Party official before disappearing, later retracting the allegation in a series of carefully stage-managed interviews.

  In June, Pavlou interrupted a speech in Sydney by Chinese Ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian (肖千), saying: “Stop platforming murderers, this is a representative of a dictatorship with 1 million Muslims in concentration camps.”

  Pavlou’s protest campaign rose to prominence at the University of Queensland, where he studies, and where he demonstrated against the influence of the university’s Chinese government-funded Confucius Institute.

  Xinjiang, in China’s northwest, is the site of a years-long crackdown by Chinese authorities on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. An estimated 1 million people have been incarcerated in a vast network of detention and re-education camps, which Beijing insists are “vocational education and training centers.”

  Document leaks have revealed that thousands have been arrested or jailed for alleged crimes, including studying scripture, growing a beard or traveling overseas, and that authorities have established “shoot to kill” policies in response to attempted escapes.

  Human rights groups and several governments have labeled the campaign a genocide or crime against humanity. Beijing denies all allegations of mistreatment and said its policies are to counter terrorism and religious extremism.
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