The grandson of one of Africa’s most iconic post-colonial leaders has told a court in London why he helped the protest group Palestine Action.
William Nyerere Plastow, 35, is charged with criminal damage in connection with a Palestine Action raid at an Israeli-owned arms factory in Bristol in August 2024.
A further joint enterprise charge of violent disorder was dismissed last week due to lack of evidence.
Plastow was arrested days after the raid and kept in prison without trial until February 2026, apart from a brief spell out on bail four days before his mother died of cancer.
The court heard on Thursday that his mother, Dr Jane Plastow, was a professor of African theatre and his father, Charles Makongoro Nyerere, is a politician in Tanzania.
Plastow’s grandfather, Julius Nyerere, was Tanzania’s first president having led the country out of British rule.
Plastow is among eight people on trial at the Old Bailey for allegedly organising the raid on an Elbit Systems factory in the Filton area of Bristol that took place in the early hours of 6 August 2024.
He is the only one whom the prosecution does not allege travelled to Bristol before the raid, and police accept he was at home in Manchester throughout the incident.
Plastow admits buying equipment for Palestine Action but denies knowing it would be used for the specific raid, which saw activists use a former prison van to ram their way into the factory and smash drones.
He said: “I first heard about the incident at Filton – and the existence of the site at Filton – when I was walking home from the gym looking at my phone at 8am”, on 6 August 2024, several hours after the raid.
“I’d done an early morning session and, as I walked home, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed,” when he saw a tweet from Palestine Action with a photo of the prison van crashing into the Filton factory.
The tweet read: “By dismantling machinery and weapons, they directly intervened in Elbit’s genocidal supply chain.”
Palestine Action drives a former prison van into Elbit’s factory on 6 August 2024. (Photo: Palestine Action)
How Plastow became involved in Palestine Action
Plastow, who has a double first in social anthropology from Cambridge University, said Palestine “didn’t become a massive focus for me until the start of the genocide and seeing those images everyday of those kids blown to pieces…buildings knocked down with whole families inside them”.
Having worked for the BBC as a scriptwriter on medical dramas such as Doctors and Casualty, he rankled at suggestions that the images coming out of Gaza were fake, saying they were “100% not”.
He began going on pro-Palestine marches in Manchester, initially in a wheelchair since he had recently undergone major surgery on his leg.
He also wrote to his local MP, Jeff Smith, who allegedly responded by saying a “ceasefire would be a very bad idea and was premature”.
Addressing the jury, Plastow said: “How’s anyone supposed to feel about seeing dismembered children and then being told nothing should be done about it?”
Speaking of the marches, he said: “It felt very obvious that all of that was pretty futile”.
Instead, he became drawn to Palestine Action, due to their success in Manchester at getting a local landlord to drop Elbit as a client.
He said the group had “actually managed to close several factories that were sending genocidal machinery to slaughter children in Gaza.
“This was stuff around Manchester. This was all very local. It was within 10 miles.”
Plastow started saying: “I found it very shocking. Elbit supplied 85% of…” but was cut off by lawyers.
Rephrasing, he said: “It felt like finding out this was the Holocaust and the zyklon gas being used in Auschwitz was being made ten minutes up the road.”
He filled out a form on the internet expressing interest in attending a Palestine Action training day.
Trying to explain his motivation again, he began to say: “This was the height of things [in Gaza] and the International Court of Justice had just found…” but was cut off by the judge Patrick Field for legal reasons.
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That action, which was allegedly coordinated by co-defendant Sean Middlebrough, saw Plastow drive a van at low speed into a bollard before locking himself inside the van.
He was arrested at the scene and granted bail. Afterwards he told Palestine Action he only had time to assist with “a couple of runs to the shops”, as his mother had cancer and he was increasingly busy with work.
Although he was added to Signal groups whose membership included other co-defendants in this trial, Plastow said he “didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to them” and his lawyer said he “consistently rejected incoming calls.”
“I just wasn’t interested…I was very busy…I was thinking about my mum…I didn’t have time to have some long talking shop with a bunch of people I didn’t know.”
He denied knowing five of the six “red team” activists before they broke into Elbit’s Bristol factory and knew none of the alleged “black team” members who caused a diversion outside.
Of his seven co-defendants – the alleged “organisers” – he only interacted with Middlebrough and briefly with Ian Sanders, who was described in character references read in court on Thursday as a “kind, gentle and considerate person” raised by his Quaker mother “with the important values of peace and social justice.”
Middlebrough, who is being tried in absentia, was described by Plastow as “a guy with a strong Liverpool accent.”
Sean Middlebrough
‘El Granma’
In early August 2024, Middlebrough asked Plastow to purchase equipment for Palestine Action without telling him exactly how it would be used, the court heard.
Middlebrough, who used the alias El Granma, reimbursed Plastow and said someone would collect the purchases soon from his house in Manchester. The items, costing hundreds of pounds, included hand tools, protective equipment, head torches and rucksacks.
Plastow believed they would be taken in a car or small van and placed in a general stockpile for Palestine Action – rather than used immediately for a high profile raid – as the group had told him it was in the process of establishing lock-ups in different locations.
However, on 3 August 2024, Charlotte Head, who was a member of the red team, parked a prison van near Plastow’s house in order to collect the items.
“I was deeply surprised and not especially happy to have such a weird vehicle turn up,” Plastow told the court.
“From this point on, all I wanted was for this to go, to get on with my weekend and for this problem to go away.”
He had not met Head before and said: “She seemed very frazzled so I offered her a cup of tea. I thought ‘have a cuppa and then go’…Towards the end, she told me she doesn’t know where she’s going to go next.”
Plastow urged Middlebrough to give Head directions so she could leave, but as it became late, he let her stay the night in his spare room.
The next day, co-defendant Ian Sanders arrived at the house to help Head depart but Middlebrough told them to wait for him to join as well.
“It was going to be midday and then time kept slipping…They still didn’t leave…I was pretty annoyed,” Plastow recalled, feeling Middlebrough had “messed me around pretty badly”.
When Middlebrough did eventually arrive, he did not “say thanks or apologise, just gives me a little wave.”
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“I wasn’t happy about it,” Plastow said, adding that he “felt kind of duped” by Middlebrough.
In a subsequent Signal call, a Palestine Action figure admitted to him that some of the items he purchased had been used at Filton.
“He told me people had been arrested under terrorism powers and that people that weren’t the actionists had been arrested, which hadn’t happened before”.
“I was really frightened,” he told the court, saying the Filton raid had “happened when I was asleep” and he “couldn’t imagine” being arrested for it.
On 9 August, he said “about 20 guys came into my house and arrested me under the Terrorism Act. They kept me in for six days in a little white room with no windows and lights that didn’t go off.
“I told them everything I was doing on the sixth [of August]. That was the last day I got to spend with my mum before she was on her death bed.”
He denied intending to encourage or assist anyone to commit criminal damage at Filton.
‘Save lives’
During cross-examination, prosecutor Harry Warner repeatedly contended that Plastow knew the items he purchased would be used by Palestine Action to damage property belonging to Elbit.
Plastow insisted they would be “used by Palestine Action to save lives”, adding that the “purpose of the organisation was to save lives from being killed”.
He denied knowing of a plan to target the Filton site and said during his evidence: “I think nothing about Palestine Action could be described as highly organised.
“It was chaotic and a bunch of loosely connected people scrabbling around.”
When Plastow was granted bail for the second time in February 2026, he said: “I went back to my childhood home, my mum’s house – obviously she wasn’t there any more.”
The trial continues
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