Anti-Ulez activist Kevin Rees, who blew up a camera enforcing London’s ultra-low emission zone scheme with a home-made bomb, has been jailed for 15 years. The Telegraph has more.
Kevin Rees, 63, a retired electrical appliances engineer, prompted a counter-terrorism investigation by detonating explosives in the camera in Sidcup, south London, at 6.45pm on Dec 6th 2023.
The improvised explosive device damaged cars and property up to 100m away, with shrapnel striking the outside of a child’s bedroom.
Rees, of Sidcup, was convicted after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court in January of one count of causing an explosion likely to endanger life. On Friday, Judge Anthony Bate sentenced him at the Old Bailey to 15 years in prison.
Det Ch Supt James Derham, who leads local policing in the Bexley area, said: “It was miraculous that nobody was killed or seriously injured in the large explosion caused by Rees.
“He showed a complete disregard for the welfare and safety of the people who live in, or were travelling through, the area at the time of the explosion – all because he was unhappy with the Ulez scheme.
“CCTV from a bus travelling down the road at the time shows how it narrowly missed the blast of debris by seconds.”
Rees’s sentencing comes a day after 700 prisoners were released from jail as part of Labour’s efforts to avoid prisons running out of space. They were released after serving only a third of their sentences for offences including theft, assault, domestic abuse and fraud.
Another 3,800 will be released early over the next 10 months, including more serious offenders who were sentenced to spend more than a decade in jail.
There was strong opposition to the Ulez scheme, which requires drivers to pay a daily charge based on their car’s emissions, after it was expanded in 2023 to cover all London boroughs.
Transport for London (TfL) uses cameras to monitor the vehicles that enter and exit the zone, triggering fines for motorists who have not paid the daily charge.
Worth reading in full.
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15 years in jail for destroying a ULEZ camera? Has your country gone insane? Pretty soon the real criminals will be running the country, while the petty criminals are serving time. This country is definitely screwed.
Lucky nobody got killed or the charge would have been manslaughter.
I have a great deal of sympathy for his opposition to the ULEZ extortion.
But not for the means by which he disabled the camera. A pair of wire cutters would have done the job.
Agreed. I understand action to disable these cameras. The decent half of this country is getting the jackboot treatment from the Progressive Left, so reasonably disabling the tools they use is fine with me.
However, not when they put the safety of others at risk. This was a thoroughly stupid act, and he has rightly been imprisoned. If shrapnel had killed any of my loved ones, I wouldn’t have thanked him…
“Appliance engineer”. A real engineer would have calculated the amount of explosive used to just destroy the camera.
Shades of The Italian Job me thinks.
Seems blowing up a ULEZ camera is a terrorist offence. Who knew?
Seems he was also convicted of having some home-made stun guns – but not for being in possession of explosives. The police report that ‘black powder’ was used in the bomb, so where did he get it? We are not told.
Kevin Rees himself denies blowing up the camera. If a homemade explosive was used to do it, we should expect there to be some evidence of equipment and substances used by Rees to make the explosive. Nothing of this sort was found.
We are told that a sealed packet of aluminium powder was found in his home, and a packet of iron oxide. We are invited to believe that these two substances actually formed the explosive. But they don’t. They form thermite, which is a pyrotechnic but not an explosive. Thermite is used every day for joining railway lines, for example.
There is a lot that is very odd about this case.
Correct. Thermite is not an explosive. When ignited by a high temperature fuse, such as magnesium ribbon, it creates an exothermic reaction to form molten iron. This is used to join railway lines, but thermite in a small pottery plant pot stood on top of the Gatso speed cameras was a popular method of destroying the internal cameras and control boards.
Black Powder or Gunpowder is a low explosive powder made from a combination of Sulphur (10%), Carbon (15%) and Potassium Nitrate (75%). Black Powder deflagrates rather than explodes (it has a velocity of detonation <1000m/s) when confined and is used in ‘gentle’ blasting applications such as stone or slate production, primarily to limit the formation of excessive cracks in the deposit being worked. The energy released that caused the alleged damage seems to have come from a high explosive HE device.
I wonder who put it there ? The location and size could have been calculated from direction and velocity of the many fragments pictured. But no evidence that Kevin Rees had any traces of HE, let alone Black Powder is reported.
State-driven act of desperation by someone at the end of their tether. Someone who has clearly had enough.
I wonder when we will all receive a helpful leaflet from our caring government, stating that, besides it not being nice to ogle and rape women, children and elderly men; not nice to routinely carry and threaten to use machetes and sharp implements; not nice to pilfer from shops; not nice to menacingly stand outside schools and playgrounds; not nice to enter playgroups and children’s areas and savagely kill them; not nice to deliberately target the public and drive at speed into crowds; perhaps not nice to carry a baseball / cricket bat in public on the way to a game; definitely not nice to say or write hurty things about others.
It will have to be an updated version, though, with the addition of, it is not nice to carry and use explosive and / or potentially deadly devices which could maim or kill – whether out of extreme frustration or whatever – and aimed especially towards / against the diabolical outreach of tyrannical governments and authorities – unless of course, it is in state sanctioned warfare in contrived, phoney… Read more »
Repeated literal child rapists get a fraction of that sentence. No 2 tier justice in the UK
I don’t care how aggrieved he felt. The man is a dangerous fool.
The fact that he felt driven to take such an extreme action says much about the appalling state to which our country has come.
I do agree with that.
Hear, hear.
An order of 50 hard-boiled eggs?
Yeah, sure. That’s why he got 15 years. Because if there is one thing the establishment won’t tolerate is serious injury to ordinary people.
The heavy handedness has nothing at all to do with the fact that the most draconian punishments just always seem to go to people who challenge the state’s policies and authority.
Got it in one.
See also: 2 years for throwing an empty plastic bottle at the Plod, and 31 months for a quickly-deleted tweet. Compare and contrast the sentences handed out (or not) to illegal migrants committing sexual assaults.
Three points please.
Couldn’t agree more. Plus they fill the pages with drivel about the likes of Brooklyn Beckham & the Californian grifters. They never miss a chance to smear Farage & Reform, who should be their natural readership.
It also has great sympathy for the Jews to have their own homeland but not for the English to have their ancestral homeland back from the hordes of invaders entering this country year after year for decades.
Planting a bomb in a street is hardly comparable to driving a vehicle in a manner below the standard of a careful and competent driver.
Had it killed, the charge would have been manslaughter. Sentence: unlawful-act manslaughter, Life imprisonment up to 24 years.
😂