2 days ago
‘My daughter Zoe is not a terrorist. Why has she spent a year in prison?'
Zoe Rogers has not been charged with a terrorist offence. on Saturday, she marked a year in detention without trial inside HMP Bronzefield, a high-security prison in Surrey.
Rogers, 21, was arrested during a Palestine Action raid on a site run by Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit in Filton, near Bristol, last August.
'My daughter is not a terrorist,' said her mother, Clare Hinchcliffe. 'They charged them with violent disorder, criminal damage and aggravated burglary,' she added, referring to her daughter and her co-defendants, who are collectively known as the Filton 24.
Palestine Action had not yet been banned as a terrorist organisation – a move that has seen more than 700 people arrested for public displays of alleged support for the group since 5 July, when it was proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Shy and autistic, Rogers is one of two dozen defendants in that case who have been denied bail. She has pleaded not guilty.
Hinchcliffe, a senior campaigner for the London Cycling Campaign, said her daughter had been questioned by counter-terrorism police for five days and that she and others had faced 'the full force of the counter-terror police against them', adding: 'That has been absolutely terrifying.'
The Crown Prosecution Service said that it would be seeking to argue that the alleged offences had 'a terrorist connection'.
Under legislation drawn up in 2020 in response to two Islamist knife attacks, a terrorist connection is an aggravating factor, meaning that it could be applied by a judge when sentencing.
The allegations in the case have been seen as a key part of the decision to proscribe Palestine Action and have contributed to the secrecy in the government's repeated defence of the ban, with ministers attempting to distinguish the issue from the broader right to protest and from deepening public outrage at what is happening in Gaza.
Central to efforts to shore up the ban are as yet unproven accusations of violence against individuals. The attack on the Filton factory allegedly involved a ram-raid, using a decommissioned prison van to breach a loading bay.
Samuel Corner, 23, faces charges of grievous bodily harm, and two counts of actual bodily harm involving injuries to two police officers. The charges are the only significant acts of violence against a person in the group's 356 actions since it was established in 2020. Corner has pleaded not guilty.
Hinchcliffe said she had been angered by what she viewed as the Home Office attempting to cloud matters with smears against the defendants.
The first officers who knocked on Hinchcliffe's door in Southgate, north London, last August explained that her daughter had been arrested and they had a warrant to search her room. 'When I got over the shock of having four police officers standing on my doorstep early one morning, they told me she was under arrest in Bristol police station. I asked when I could speak to her and they said it was usually after 24 hours.'
That night, Rogers, who was then 20 and had secured a place to study interdisciplinary problem solving at university, was rearrested by counter-terrorism officers. It would be another five days before she saw her mother.
'It was very emotional, seeing her through two layers of security glass because I was in a box and she was in a box. She was with two others, flanked by officers. I'm so proud of her. She was sitting between the other two. The other two looked very distressed and she was looking strong. She was holding their hands.'
Their lawyer saw no legal reason Rogers would not be granted bail and her grandparents had offered a large amount of money in surety, but it was denied.
Hinchcliffe said: 'But then the judge decides: 'No, I'm refusing bail' – something about the risk of reoffending – and within seconds they were being led out of the room and I just felt viscerally like she was being ripped from my arms.'
After almost two weeks, mother and daughter finally managed their first phone call, Hinchcliffe said.
'I guess the feeling was relief to have finally spoken to her, relief that she sounded kind of OK, and anger – why was she in prison? Those first few weeks, I was just in shock.'
She added: 'I had a Fitbit at the time. My resting heart rate was constantly higher than it used to be. I was kind of in fight-or-flight mode. I remember just lying down and trying to sleep and my heart pounding. You've got this kind of irrational sense of: 'I have to go and save her and I can't.''
Soon after, the house was raided by a dozen counter-terrorism officers. 'They were trying to be discreet but that's a bit hard with 12 officers in forensic aprons and gloves going in and out. My neighbours just thought someone had been murdered.'
She said they seized a laptop belonging to her younger daughter, Ffion, as well as her classics homework.
Hinchcliffe, a devout Christian, said her minister was among the hundreds of protesters arrested just over a week ago for holding signs in support of Palestine Action. 'It's been surreal. I think it's great to see how ridiculous a government's being made to look by all these brave people who are prepared to face arrest.'
She said that in the weeks after Hamas's surprise attack on Israel in October 2023, her daughter had started attending marches.
Hinchcliffe remembers, too, when Rogers began to lose hope after months of protests as the bombing and aid blockades continued in Gaza. 'It's the deaths of the children that she cannot bear. She decided she was going to write all the names of the children who'd been killed so far and their ages on this big bedsheet. And she never wrote a single name. She just couldn't face it.
'She just became overwhelmed. She didn't go to the march, she didn't leave her bedroom the whole weekend. I think that was the point when she decided: the marches aren't working; our government's not listening.'
Standing in her daughter's undisturbed bedroom, Hinchcliffe unfurled a black screenprint that showed the text of a poem Rogers, who faces trial in November, wrote from prison.
'When they ask why,' she wrote, 'I tell them about the children…I tell them about the boy found carrying his brother's body inside his bloody backpack. I tell them about the girl whose hanging corpse ended at the knees. I tell them about the father holding up his headless toddler.'
The final line reads: 'It was love, not hate, that called me.'
