A climate activist has compared himself to Martin Luther King after he glued himself to a Vincent van Gogh painting.
Louis McKechnie, a Just Stop Oil protester, drew the comparison between him and the civil rights leader in court before he was sentenced for damaging the artwork’s frame.
He and Emily Brocklebank, 24, another activist, were found guilty of causing just under £2,000 of criminal damage.
The pair superglued themselves to Van Gogh’s 1889 work Peach Trees In Blossom at the Courtauld Gallery in London on 30 June.
McKechnie, 22, appeared in court via videolink from HMP Peterborough.
Asked if the protests had public support, he said Dr King was “the most hated man in America” in 1960.
Yet the civil rights movement “still worked”, he said, and “people don’t have to like what we’re doing”.
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McKechnie, from Weymouth, Dorset, has previous convictions for climate protests.
In September he was given a six-week term for tying himself to the goalpost during a Premier League match between Everton and Newcastle in March, which caused the game to be postponed.
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Just Stop Oil wants the government to stop issuing all new oil and gas licences.
‘Artist’s wishes’
In court on Tuesday, McKechnie suggested Van Gogh would have supported their protest because he valued nature.
“I believe that a completely logical person who is not a psychopath who owns a painting of this value by Vincent van Gogh would have respected the artist’s wishes,” he said.
“He said himself that the art of nature is not as valuable as nature itself.”
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Oil protesters glued to masterpiece in the National Gallery
Francesca Cociani, for the defence, asked Karen Serres, a curator at the gallery, whether the painting would go up in value because of the protest.
Ms Serres replied: “Absolutely not.”
The incident was caught in CCTV footage, which shows the activists walking into the building after purchasing tickets for an exhibition.
They then took off their jackets to reveal orange Just Stop Oil T-shirts and attached themselves to the artwork.
‘Permanent damage’
Sentencing the pair at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, District Judge Neeta Minhas said the 18th-century frame had been “permanently damaged”.
McKechnie was jailed for three weeks and Brocklebank, from Yeadon, Leeds, received a 21-day sentence, suspended for six months.
She was also given a six-week curfew, during which she will be electronically monitored.
McKechnie was previously handed a six-week prison sentence in September over the Premier League match protest.
A man wrongly jailed for 17 years for a rape he did not commit has said it is “too little too late” after receiving an apology from the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).
Andrew Malkinson was jailed in 2003 but eventually released in December 2020.
His charges were quashed last year after new DNA evidence potentially linked another man to the crime.
The CCRC has now offered Mr Malkinson an unreserved apology after the completion of a report from an independent review by Chris Henley KC into the handling of the case.
But reacting to the apology, Mr Malkinson said the time for CCRC chairman Helen Pitcher OBE to apologise was when he was exonerated last summer.
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Malkinson: Wrongly imprisoned for rape
“The CCRC’s delay in apologising to me added significantly to the mental turmoil I am experiencing as I continue to fight for accountability for what was done to me,” Mr Malkinson said.
“The CCRC’s failings caused me a world of pain. Even the police apologised straight away. It feels like Helen Pitcher is only apologising now because the CCRC has been found out, and the last escape hatch has now closed on them.”
He said his lawyer had written to Ms Pitcher last September requesting an apology, to which she refused.
He added: “It is hard for me to see the sincerity in an apology after all this time – when you are truly sorry for what you have done, you respond immediately and instinctively, it wells up in you.”
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Earlier on Thursday, Ms Pitcher released a statement saying: “Mr Henley’s report makes sobering reading, and it is clear from his findings that the commission failed Andrew Malkinson. For this, I am deeply sorry. I have written to Mr Malkinson to offer him my sincere regret and an unreserved apology on behalf of the commission.
Addressing beliefs that she was unwilling to apologise, Ms Pitcher added: “For me, offering a genuine apology required a clear understanding of the circumstances in which the commission failed Mr Malkinson. We now have that.
“Nobody can ever begin to imagine the devastating impact that Mr Malkinson’s wrongful conviction has had on his life, and I can only apologise for the additional harm caused to him by our handling of his case.”
Mr Malkinson had applied for his case to be reviewed by the CCRC in 2009, but at the conclusion of its review in 2012 the commission refused to order further forensic testing or refer the case for appeal, amid concerns over costs.
Critical DNA evidence had been available since 2007, but no match was found on the police database at the time.
Since Mr Malkinson had his conviction quashed, dozens of rape and murder convictions from before 2016 are set to undergo fresh DNA testing to identify potential miscarriages of justice.
The CCRC said it has re-examined nearly 5,500 cases that it previously rejected in the light of improvement in DNA analysis techniques.
Its initial trawl last summer found around a quarter of the cases are those where the identity of the offender is challenged.
Focusing on those, it says there are potentially several dozen cases where DNA samples could be retested using the DNA 17 technique, first introduced in 2014.
Dozens of people around the world have been arrested after police disrupted a UK-founded website scamming victims on an industrial scale.
LabHost, a site set up in 2021, tricked as many as 70,000 UK victims, obtaining 480,000 card numbers and 64,000 PINs worldwide, the Metropolitan Police said.
It was created by a criminal network and enabled more than 2,000 users to set up phishing websites designed to steal personal information such as email addresses, passwords and bank details.
Criminal subscribers could log on and choose from existing sites or request bespoke pages replicating those of trusted brands such as banks, healthcare agencies and postal services.
The website even provided a tutorial to cater for wannabe fraudsters with limited IT knowledge, with a robotic voice saying at the end: “Stay safe and good spamming”.
Those subscribing to worldwide membership – meaning they could target victims all around the world – paid between £200 and £300 a month.
Since it began, the site has received just under £1m in payments from criminal users.
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But just after it was seized and disrupted, its 800 customers got a message telling them that police knew who they were and what they were doing.
Thirty-seven people were arrested around the world, including some at Manchester and Luton airports, as well as in Essex and London.
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Detectives have also contacted up to 25,000 UK-based victims to tell them their data has been compromised.
Police began investigating LabHost in June 2022 after they were tipped off by the Cyber Defence Alliance – a group of British-based banks and law enforcement agencies which share intelligence.
Dame Lynne Owens, deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, said: “Online fraudsters think they can act with impunity. They believe they can hide behind digital identities and platforms such as LabHost and have absolute confidence these sites are impenetrable by policing.
“But this operation and others over the last year show how law enforcement worldwide can, and will, come together with one another and private sector partners to dismantle international fraud networks at source.”
Adrian Searle, director of the National Economic Crime Centre in the NCA, said: “This operation again demonstrates that UK law enforcement has the capability and intent to identify, disrupt and completely compromise criminal services that are targeting the UK on an industrial scale.”