38-year-old charged with criminal damage after ‘Zionist war criminal’ slogan sprayed in red paint on Churchill statue in Parliament Square…reports Asian Lite News
The 38-year-old was detained on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage, according to the Metropolitan Police. Officers said they were called shortly after 4am on Friday 27 February after reports that a man had been seen spraying the bronze monument in Westminster, central London.
Police said the first officers arrived within two minutes and arrested the suspect at the scene. Red paint was sprayed across the statue, including the phrases “Stop the Genocide”, “Free Palestine”, “Never again is Now” and “Globalise the Intifada”. The monument was cordoned off later in the morning as specialist teams began cleaning work.
A spokesperson for 10 Downing Street condemned the attack as “completely abhorrent”. “Churchill was a great Briton. This government will always stand up for our values and the perpetrator must be held to account,” the spokesperson said. The Home Office also criticised the vandalism. A spokesperson said: “Sir Winston Churchill is a figure of great national pride. The vile vandals defacing this statue are a disgrace.”
Responsibility for the action was claimed by a Dutch group calling itself Free the Filton 24, which posted a video on Instagram appearing to show a man spraying the statue. The group describes itself as “family and friends” of Palestine Action activists charged over a break-in at one of Israeli defence firm Elbit’s UK sites in 2024.
The slogan “Globalise the Intifada” has been the subject of recent police scrutiny. In December, both the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police said individuals chanting the phrase could face arrest, following the Bondi Beach terror attack in Australia and an attack at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester in October.
Churchill’s statue has been targeted before during protests. In June 2020, amid global Black Lives Matter demonstrations sparked by the killing of George Floyd in the United States, the plinth was daubed with graffiti accusing the former prime minister of racism. Later that year, an Extinction Rebellion activist was fined more than £1,500 after painting the word “racist” on the monument during a climate protest.
The 12ft (3.6m) sculpture was created by artist Ivor Roberts-Jones and unveiled in 1973 by Churchill’s widow, Lady Churchill. It stands among 12 statues in and around Parliament Square, including monuments to figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela.
Meanwhile, Vandalism on the London Underground has surged dramatically, with new figures revealing a doubling of criminal damage offences as a persistent graffiti epidemic spreads across key Tube lines.
Data released by Transport for London shows that recorded incidents of criminal damage on its network rose by more than 100 per cent in the second half of last year, driven largely by repeated graffiti attacks on trains. The increase comes despite overall crime levels on London’s transport network remaining relatively stable and significantly lower than on the national rail system.
Between July and December 2025, TfL recorded 2,881 incidents of criminal damage, compared with 1,429 during the same period a year earlier. Of those offences, 2,390 occurred on the London Underground, highlighting the scale of the problem facing Tube services.
The rise stands out against wider trends in the capital, where overall crime fell by 3.6 per cent during the same period, underlining how vandalism on public transport has bucked the broader decline.
