Home | Friday 20th June 2008 | Issue 636

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NEVER MIND THE BALLUCHS?

Dr Martin Balluch, Austrian animal rights campaigner, has been arrested and is one of ten held on remand, since May 21st, after a massive, violent police attack involving hundred of police and raids on 21 homes and 6 offices of animal rights sympathisers in Austria.

After police smashed their way into his home – and those of his two brothers and girlfriend - Martin had a gun pointed to his head and was pulled out of bed naked. They have nothing concrete on Martin or the other arrestees, but with all the computers and papers they have confiscated they are trying to build a fiction that Martin and others were “forming a large criminal organisation with a hierarchical structure like a company” - now a heinous crime in Austria under a new anti-terror and mafia law. This is the latest weapon in a large scale police campaign against animal rights activists which has already been going on for several years, involving phone and email tapping, surveillance and forensics.

.... For those of you with a memory of more than two weeks, a lot of this stuff sounds eerily similar to a case a little closer to home, that of Sean Kirtley (see SchNEWS 634, 632) who has recently been given 4½ years under section 145 of SOCPA for “Interfering with the contractual relationships of a laboratory.” Across Europe ever more vaguely-worded crimes are worming their way into the statute books and are used to stitch up people the authorities see as ‘key’ activists, with animal rights activists first in the firing line. Who’s next?

* Write to Martin c/- Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network, BM Box 2407, London, WC1N 3XX. www.spiritoffreedom.org.uk

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