‘I took a picture of Tower Bridge and was arrested for terrorism’

© Cartoon Copyright Clang 2007

Government ministers and police chiefs are demanding new powers to allow the police to stop and search people in the streets if they suspect them of terrorism. These powers echo the notorious “sus laws” of the 1970s. Then the laws created an atmosphere of fear as police targeted young black men. Those laws were abandoned after widespread rioting in the early 1980s.

A glimpse of what these new laws would mean was shown last week when two foreign students were arrested for “terrorism” after taking snapshots of Tower Bridge.

Salam Abdulrahman is a politics student at Swansea university. On 14 May he and a friend travelled to London to arrange funding for a PhD.

After their meeting they decided to visit tourist attractions and walked around the capital taking pictures.

Salam told Socialist Worker, “We went to Tower Bridge and then to Big Ben.

“I took pictures of many beautiful views. The final one I took, minutes before being arrested, was a building belonging to the MI5 security services – which I only discovered was an MI5 building when in jail.

“We did not realise we were being watched. As we approached Scotland Yard we were stopped by police.

“They questioned us, took our student IDs and searched us.

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