UK police arrest man after Churchill statue sprayed with graffiti

The 3.6m Churchill statue has been vandalised a number of times in recent years. Read more at straitstimes.com.

LONDON – A 38-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated criminal damage, UK police said on Feb 27, after pro-Palestinian graffiti was sprayed on a Winston Churchill statue in central London.

The iconic monument to Britain’s World War II prime minister in Parliament Square “was graffitied with red paint” overnight, the Metropolitan Police said on X.

“Officers were on scene within two minutes of being alerted shortly after 4am,” the force said.

The incident came as police in Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast, appealed for witnesses after a statue of Queen Victoria was vandalised, apparently by Irish Republican group Lasair Dhearg.

The group posted a picture on social media appearing to show one of its supporters pouring red paint over the statue of the monarch whom it called the “Famine Queen”, a reference to the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century.

In London, the graffiti, which workers cleaned early on Feb 27, called the wartime leader a “zionist war criminal”.