SHAC donations went to terrorize UK companies (Times)‏
Sent: January 5, 2009 5:10:33 PM
The Times (UK)
The £1m hate campaign paid for by high street collections
Organisers used cash to terrorise suppliers into dropping trade with
animal research firm
By Fran Yeoman
December 24, 2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5391799.ece In the nine years since the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)
campaign began, millions of people have walked past its stalls on
Britain's high streets. Paraded before a nation of animal lovers, the
posters depicting haunted creatures in global research laboratories
helped to bring around £1 million in donations to SHAC's collection
buckets and bank account.
One stall in Oxford Street could make £500 in a single day, and many
thousands of ordinary members of the public signed the petition to
close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), thinking that they were
doing their bit to stop animal research taking place in its
Cambridgeshire laboratory.
Many of those signatures did not reach Downing Street, or anywhere
else. Boxes of petition sheets were found in May last year by police
who raided the cottage at Little Moorcote, Hampshire, from where SHAC
was run with "almost military precision".
Almost £100,000 in cash was also found across 29 addresses that were
searched at the end of a two-year police investigation costing
millions of pounds. Other funds had been spent on co-ordinating an
international blackmail campaign against hundreds of victims, some
with only the most tangential connection to HLS. They paid,
indirectly, for SHAC's targets to receive hoax bombs, threats that
they would be stabbed with HIV-infected needles and receive "home
visits" from balaclava-wearing vandals.
There were two faces to SHAC, which was created in 1999 by Gregg
Avery, his first wife Heather Nicholson and Natasha Dallemagne, later
Avery, his second wife. The campaign, which remains active and is not
an illegal organisation, grew rapidly and internationally. At one
stage its bank account had a turnover of about £150,000 a year, while
the British mailing list topped 10,000, the vast majority of whom
simply had a concern for animal rights and took part in nothing more
than legal protest.
Pulling the strings was Gregg Avery, a veteran activist with animal
rights related convictions. Having run campaigns to close down a
beagle kennels and a cat farm that supplied vivisection facilities, he
had a bigger target by 1999. HLS, which had been the subject of an
undercover Channel 4 documentary, was it.
As they bugged conversations inside Little Moorcote, police heard
Nicholson describe their campaign as "a straightforward battle between
good and evil, it's like Heaven and [Please excuse my language... I'm an idiot] . . . black and white, simple
as that".
"There is a scale of hatred. How I feel goes off the scale," she told
fellow conspirator Daniel Amos, referring to those who worked inside
HLS. "I could kill every last one of them and I wouldn't think
anything of it."
Gregg Avery knew that HLS directors and staff would be prepared to
suffer for their livelihoods: they were used to abuse and attack. But
the company's financial and physical supply chains — its banks,
customers and contractors – could be its Achilles' heel. The couriers,
scaffolders and bakeries for whom the laboratory was only one contract
out of many would be, he concluded, less likely to take a stand when
their families were threatened and neighbours began hearing anonymous
allegations of paedophilia.
He was right. Under a barrage of threats and blackmail – the almost
inevitable consequence of being listed on SHAC's website as an HLS
"collaborator" – one company after the next bowed to the order to
e-mail info@shac.net promising to sever all ties. More than 270
businesses, from local firms to multinationals, are listed on the SHAC
"roll of honour" of "companies who have dumped HLS".
HLS contractors and suppliers abroad were not safe. There were trips
to Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere, where
SHAC's British hierarchy would meet local activists to stage menacing
protests and clandestine home visits.
"People say, 'I'm not letting these [Please excuse my language... I'm an idiot] push me around' and three
weeks later they pull out," as one former SHAC target told The Times.
"In the end barely anyone got physically attacked . . . but it is the
psychological impact, the thought that this could be more."
Spreadsheets recovered from the conspirators' computers recorded the
names and whereabouts of targets as well as details about their
children and security arrangements.
Potential victims were painstakingly researched, a process in which
Gavin Medd-Hall, a middle-aged former computer technician from
Croydon, often took the lead. The hounding of these targets was also
carefully logged – in public usually through "action reports" that
appeared on extremist websites. In private, using an e-mail encryption
programme that they thought had bought them secrecy, Avery and his
core group compiled detailed three-monthly reports of their legal
protests and illegal blackmail campaign.
The former were carefully labelled SHAC, a well-known brand in the
animal rights movement that was adopted by activists around the world.
The latter always took the badge of the "animal rights militia" or
Animal Liberation Front (ALF).
Although the SHAC inner circle always denied any connection to the
latter, an anonymous newsletter entitled "Animal Abusers Index" found
at the Averys' address painted a different picture. "HLS will not
close by us saying aren't the ALF wonderful when they are no different
from every single one of you," it read. "You are the ALF." This,
prosecutors believe, pointed to the truth: the ALF has no formal
membership card, but key figures in the SHAC leadership were at the
heart of its activities.
The balaclavas, spray paint and burnt-out remains of a mobile phone
discovered during police raids suggested the same thing.
The Averys, veterans of this world, groomed idealistic young activists
such as Daniel Wadham and Gerrah Selby to be its next generation. This
group didn't normally write the poison-pen letters and send the hoax
bombs themselves – there were others willing to do that – but they
researched, fundraised and publicised.
They sensed victory as HLS's share price collapsed and the company
left the London Stock Exchange for New York. Even now, although the
company's finances are sounder than they once were, HLS banks through
the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform because
its custom is not welcome elsewhere.
By 2005, however, there was a growing mood that the animal rights
movement – legal and otherwise – had been getting its own way for too
long. The University of Cambridge had pulled out of building a
research facility, and construction at Oxford's laboratory was on hold
after the contractor withdrew.
The British police began an operation which involved five forces and
the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit, the City of London
Economic Crime Unit and the Serious Organised Crime Agency.
In June 2006 Gregg Avery told an interviewer that SHAC had not done
anything illegal since 2000, when he and his wife were given 12-month
jail terms for publicising HLS employees' addresses on the internet.
The hounding of HLS contractors since was the work of other
unconnected groups, such as the ALF, he said.
"Our phones are tapped, our cars have tracking devices on them, our
e-mails are read.
Believe me, if we were involved in anything illegal
the police would be the first to know," Avery said. A year later, as
700 police officers swooped on addresses across Britain, Belgium and
the Netherlands, he would be proved right.