Press Releases & Updates 2001

Bernard de Witte (57), is a member of Trident Ploughshares and the Brussels-based For Mother Earth campaign. Earlier this month he was arrested twice during the Trident Ploughshares camp at Aldermaston, where the components for the UK’s Trident nuclear warheads are manufactured. On the 14th May he cut down two sections of the site’s perimeter fence. Bernard said: "I took a bolt cutter and went off exactly to the spot where two days before I had cut myself an entrance into the site and started to cut the fence. To my surprise I could ’work’ undisturbed during more than half an hour, so I was able to cut down a whole section and was already like three quarters on my way to cut the next section, when finally the police arrived and arrested me while I was still cutting."

Bernard decided to plead guilty to get the case over as quickly as possible but he had decided before the trial that he would not pay any fine, saying: "I prefer to be sent to prison instead of giving money to a system which maintains nuclear weapons." The magistrates found him guilty of criminal damage and fined him several hundred pounds. When he refused to pay they sent him to Bullingdon Prison*. He will be released on Monday or Tuesday next week.

Bernard is a determined campaigner who has been arrested 13 times on Trident Ploughshares actions. His sentence will bring to 1117 the number of days spent in prison by the campaign’s activists.

Additional Contacts: For Mother Earth: 0032 9 242 8752

*HM Prison Bullingdon, P.O. Box 50, Bicester, Oxon, OX6 0PR. Tel 01869 322111

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