Letter to Police Scotland, 16 April 2025

SPSC's founding member, Mick Napier, visited some Palestinian refugee camps and political contacts in Lebanon in February 2025. That visit coincided with the gathering of enormous crowds for the funeral of the assassinated Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Mick then returned to Scotland and was met by the political police.

Letter to Police Scotland, 16 April 2025

To Whom It May Concern at Police Scotland

When I landed at Edinburgh Airport six weeks ago today - on 26 February - I was greeted not with a welcome home, but with police invoking anti-terrorism legislation to confiscate my telephone and a small piece of fabric, a keepsake from my visit to Lebanon. They also took my passport and a tablet though these were graciously returned late the same night and a few days later respectively. The phone, however, remains in custody.

This, as your officers conceded during the seizure, is a considerable inconvenience.

If someone really wants to charge a 78-year-old anti-genocide campaigner with terrorism, may I suggest they get on with it - and make a fool of themselves.

Otherwise, perhaps it’s time to return my property.

This episode is merely the latest in a two-decade series of low-level legal harassment that has achieved - after 19 years of Scottish court time and at staggering public expense - convictions for shouting on a demonstration, violating Covid restrictions, and trespass (i.e. stepping somewhere I apparently shouldn’t have).

So I ask - how can I reassure the state’s tireless defenders that my career in international terrorism is well and truly behind me? I don’t believe it ever got off the ground - but that could just be my amnesia, the early onset of Alzheimer’s at my advanced stage in life.

I ask only to be reunited with my phone - so I can carry on, in the few years likely remaining to me, campaigning against the actual terrorists that you seem to defend. You know, the Israeli military, whose crimes are thoroughly documented by every major human rights organisation and the United Nations.

That is why I am a proud member of Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and a member of Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee.

Yours in distress at the mass murder of my friends

Mick Napier