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.
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.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS