The jury has retired to consider its verdicts in the case of Palestine Action activists accused of breaking into an Israeli-owned arms factory in the UK.
Leona Kamio, 30, Samuel Corner, 23, Fatema Rajwani, 21, Zoe Rogers, 22, Jordan Devlin, 31, and Charlotte Head, 29, are all charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder at the Elbit Systems’ plant near Bristol on 6 August 2024.
Corner is additionally charged with grievous bodily harm with intent, for striking a police officer with a sledgehammer.
All six defendants have denied the charges. Palestine Action was proscribed by the UK government in July 2025.
During the trial, the prosecution told the court that the six defendants entered the factory with sledgehammers, intending, if needed, to injure and incapacitate security guards.
Before the jury retired on Tuesday at Woolwich Crown Court, Mr Justice Johnson, summing up, said that it was not disputed that the defendants entered without permission, carrying sledgehammers.
The prosecution, he said, was not suggesting that the defendants’ only intention was to use the sledgehammers to injure the security guards. He reminded the jury that the intention could amount to “contingent or conditional intention – in other words, an intention to do so if certain circumstances arise”.
If the defendants believed they would not have encountered security guards and thought there was no need to use their sledgehammers, but intended to use them to incapacitate the guards if they did intervene, Mr Justice Johnson said, then “that is enough” to find them guilty of aggravated burglary.
But, he said, the defendants disputed that the sledgehammers were “weapons of offence”, and were instead only intended purely to damage property.
In her closing remarks on Monday, Audrey Cherryl Mogan, who is representing Rogers, told the court that the suggestion her client intended to cause injury was a “joke” and “flies in the face of the evidence of this case and who Zoe Rogers is”.
She told the court that Rogers was barely able to lift her sledgehammer, and had to be helped to extract it from her bag by one of her co-defendants.
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Andrew Morris, who is defending Devlin, said on Monday that security guard Angelo Volante had entered the factory floor with a whip in his left hand, screaming, and then pushing Devlin. Earlier in the trial Volante said that the screaming was a de-escalation tactic.
Morris told the court that footage shows that Devlin “posed no threat to him”, as he was standing with his hands on his hips as the security guard ran in.
“[Volante] didn’t dig deep, did he?” Morris asked. “Considering his knowledge of jiu-jitsu and the de-escalation training he had.”
In his summing up, Mr Justice Johnson said that Volante told the court he rushed at Devlin “because he realised they wanted to breach the office space”.
In his evidence, Volante alleged that Rogers swung a sledgehammer at him, “but it did not fully connect”.
Mogan said Rogers had told the court she was not trying to hit him, although she accepts she was swinging it to keep him away from her.
She noted that Volante had, in his first statement, suggested that the hammer had brushed his hand. But in another statement, on 7 August, he stated that he had never said the hammer touched him.
Much of the evidence presented during the trial has focused on the CCTV system at the factory, which recorded the raid.
During his summing up, Mr Justice Johnson also said that PC Sarah Grant, a CCTV recovery officer tasked with retrieving the security footage from Elbit Systems, said that she did not download footage from two cameras because they showed no movement, due to a low frame rate.
“She was critical of the camera system and said it had inconsistent frame rates, some as low as 17 seconds,” Mr Justice Johnson told jurors. “She said the system was not fit for purpose.”
Morris also told the court that CCTV footage, missing from the evidence presented during trial, would have recorded another contested interaction between the defendant and Volante, which took place in an alcove on the factory floor.
In her closing remarks on Friday, Mira Hammad, who is representing Kamio, said that the defence did not know about gaps in footage until the trial had begun and that it was “ suspicious” that several security cameras were omitted from an initial plan of the factory distributed to the jury at the beginning of the proceedings.
The trial continues.