Dania Al-Obeida attending the Sarah Everard vigil
(Picture: Reuters)A woman who was fined for attending the vigil for murdered Londoner Sarah Everard has accused the Met Police of a “power play” by bringing criminal prosecutions and says intends to try to overturn her conviction.
Dania Al-Obeid left her home in Stratford to travel to the bandstand on Clapham Common on March 13 last year, fuelled by “anger and upset” at the kidnap, rape, and murder of Ms Everard at the hands of a serving Met officer.
She was handcuffed, arrested, and told by police that she would be fined under Covid lockdown rules for being present at the vigil, and was last week convicted in a prosecution brought by Scotland Yard.
Speaking to the Evening Standard, the 27-year-old marketing manager accused the Met of bringing an “unfair” case against her.
“It feels really surreal, it doesn’t feel right”, she said. “To be prosecuted for going, it feels so wrong. I don’t understand it.
“It feels like a power play, it feels like being intimidated, told to stand down, and be quiet about this.”
Ms Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, was abducted by Met PC Wayne Couzens on the edge of the South Circular, when he pretended to be enforcing Covid rules to get her into his car.
Couzens – now serving a whole life sentence – drove Ms Everard out of London where she was raped and murdered, with her body being dumped in the woods.
Ms Al-Obeid said she attended the vigil on her own after being “triggered” by news of the killing: “It felt very important for me to go - it was as simple as that. I wasn’t thinking I can’t walk to this vigil, I didn’t know what the rules were around it.
“It feels like we are explaining our anger and almost apologising for our anger, when in reality I’m right to be angry and upset that this happened to an innocent woman.
“Sarah was a similar age to me, we worked in a similar field, and it wasn’t too far from where I live.
“I have experienced violence, and wasn’t able to speak up against it at the time it happened. Now, this happened to another woman and all I could think was how this must have felt for her, being raped and killed.”
In police statements which accompanied the prosecutions of Ms Al-Obeid and three others, police officers complained that they had been verbally abused by the crowd at the bandstand, including being called “murderers” and claimed they decided to enforce the Covid rules when numbers swelling and officers decided it had turned from a vigil to an “anti-police protest”.
In March, the High Court ruled that Scotland Yard had misinterpreted the Covid laws when they tried to block a vigil from taking place, and had failed to consider the human rights of freedom of speech and assembly.
Ms Al-Obeid said she intends to apply to Westminster magistrates court to reopen the criminal case against her, and she is considering bringing a civil claim against the Met.
“It was not about police or anti-police – it was about a Metropolitan Police member murdering and raping a woman”, she said.
“I learned through the High Court that I had human rights, and that feels right with what I feel inside in terms of needing a space to be able to speak against violence.”
She questioned why officers in their statements had concentrated on “how they are being seen”, rather than “the genuine anger and upset from women and men that were there?”
Ms Al-Obeid said support from the public had helped her to speak out, bolstered by a sense of injustice after the Partygate scandal.
“We attended a vigil, not a party, not going to a celebration”, she said. “There is anger around what feels like a double standard. It is why I finally gathered the strength to speak up. It feels extremely unfair.
“There were parties going on at the height of the lockdown rules. Boris Johnson’s response is to apologise that it happened, say sorry, and say let’s move on.
“Meanwhile I have a conviction against my name for attending a vigil that actually shouldn’t have been banned because it was legal.
“Why is there so much time being spent prosecuting me, a person who follows the rules and never convicted before. I had human rights to attend this vigil. Why the effort to prosecute me, but no real effort to investigate Partygate and the actual parties that were being held? It is double standards and it adds to the anger I feel.”
Ms Al-Obeid was convicted with Ben Wheeler, 21, from Kennington, and Manchester resident Kevin Godin-Prior, 68, of breaching the Covid lockdown by gathering in a public place. They were each ordered to pay a £220 fine, £100 in costs, and a £34 victim surcharge.
The court said none of the defendants had entered a plea. However Ms Al-Obeid claims that repeated requests to police to be contacted by email rather than in writing were ignored – her lease was ending and she was about to leave the UK - meaning she missed the initial Fixed Penalty Notice and had no idea she was being prosecuted until she was told by the Evening Standard.
The cases against her, Mr Wheeler and Mr Godin-Prior were dealt with behind closed doors in the Single Justice Procedure last Wednesday, and in circumstances where the outcome only became public a week later.
Reclaim These Streets co-founder Jamie Klingler branded the criminal prosecutions “vindictive” and part of a “vendetta”, while barrister Adam Wagner, an expert on Covid laws, called the court process “Kafkaesque”.
“A criminal conviction for protest at a hearing nobody could attend except the judge, with no involvement from the defendants, by a law the police were found by the High Court to have fundamentally misunderstood”, he wrote on Twitter.
A fourth attendee at the vigil, Vivien Hohmann, 20, from Clapham, pleaded not guilty to breaking the Covid rules and is due to appear in open court later this month.
Two others, Jade Spence, 33, of Lambeth, south London, and Jenny Edmunds, 32, of Lewisham, south-east London, have also been charged and their cases are due to be dealt with next week.
The Met Police has been contacted for comment on its decision to bring the prosecutions.
