Breaking: police and CPS under fire after ‘houmous’ case against nurse dropped

Dad-of-two says whole family was traumatised by dawn raid on home where plainclothes detectives rifled through late mother-in-law’s artwork

Hastings nurse Chris Dindar is demanding answers after facing down a criminal prosecution for alleged crimes against houmous, which he says was politically motivated.

The East Sussex 55-year-old was charged with criminal damage last April for a February peaceful protest at a Sainsbury’s supermarket where he drew attention to their sale of Israeli-produced Sabra houmous. Sabra has been a target of the global consumer boycott ;BDS’ movement for years and was, at the time of the protest, owned by the Strauss group which provides support to the Israeli military – which is currently in the dock at the world court for carrying out genocide in Gaza – including the notorious Golani Brigade, which has been accused of committing war crimes in Gaza.

Dindar pleaded not guilty to the charge at Hastings Magistrates Court in October last year and the case was scheduled to be heard at Brighton Magistrates Court in March. However, in January – almost a year after the protest – he was informed the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) did not intend to pursue the case as there was ‘not enough evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction’.

‘Exhausting and stressful’

Dindar said the situation had been ‘exhausting and deeply stressful’ and traumatised his whole family and that Sussex Police had ‘violated’ his family home:

I’m so angry. The real crime was the way that Sainsbury’s and Sussex Police chose to weaponize the law to try and intimidate me for exposing complicity in genocide and standing up for Palestinian rights. The whole episode has been exhausting and deeply stressful.

Having three plainclothes detectives barge into my house at eight in the morning, treating me like some sort of dangerous criminal, while my other half and my daughter stood there in their night clothes, shaking, then being taken to a police cell for hours was appalling.

They violated my home and my family, going mob-handed through our property, apparently looking for pro-Palestinian paraphernalia, sifting through my recently late mother-in-law’s protest artwork, asking: ‘Oh, what have we got here then?’ Their attitude was disgusting. We were all traumatised by that invasion.

He went on to call the charge ‘ridiculous’ and ‘pathetic’:

It was so ridiculous, and it was such an obvious, pathetic attempt to kind of silence pro-Palestinian protests so I was gobsmacked when they charged me.

The charge came during the height of Israel’s fifteen-month assault on Gaza, which has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed the besieged enclave’s infrastructure for life. It formed part of an ongoing ‘lawfare’ abuse of policing and legislation to persecute, raid, harass and criminalise journalists and activists who expose and oppose Israel’s genocide, apartheid and war crimes, which the United Nations office for human rights has condemned, ignored by pro-Israel PM Keir Starmer.

The dropped case comes soon after the ‘Hastings Three’ were all acquitted during a trial in Brighton last month over a protest against a local arms manufacturer supplying weapons to Israel. A spokesperson for the Hastings and District Palestine Solidarity Campaign (HDPSC), which organised the protest said those charges had been politically-motivated in order to deter peaceful protest.

HDPSC chair Katy Colley said:

Our justice system is being abused to criminalise peaceful protest, wasting precious court time and taxpayer money to defend companies that profit from supporting illegal occupation, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Sussex Police claimed its actions, which included a multi-officer early morning raid on Dindar’s home, were ‘proportionate’:

We responded to a report of criminal damage after a significant amount of humous was removed from shelves at Sainsbury’s in St Leonards on 23 February and 10 March 2024. The products were unfit for consumption as a result, causing a financial loss to the business. 

CCTV led officers to identify a suspect and plain-clothed officers attended his address at around 8.20am on 8 April, arresting him outside of the home at his request. Officers were then led into the address, which they searched and seized a mobile phone for further enquiries to be completed, as is standard practice in order to preserve and gather evidence.

The actions of officers at the time, and the subsequent decision to present a case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), have been reviewed and were considered proportionate in the circumstances. We are aware that the CPS has since dropped the charges.

Dindar disagrees, saying the police actions were far from proportionate given the trivial nature of the alleged offence:

It’s clear the message has been coming from higher up, from the Home Office, which is actively trying to silence and repress Palestinian activism.

We’ve seen that over the last year there’s been a huge crackdown on peaceful protests, particularly when it comes to Palestine, particularly the last march in London, and the police and the courts have been used as political tools to intimidate people into silence, whether through heavy-handed arrests like mine, or demonstrations with punitive bail conditions or dragging activists like me through the courts on spurious charges.

If you challenge corporation or state complicity in Israel’s crimes, whether you call out those companies individually or the ones that profit from the occupation and apartheid, or you’re protesting arms manufacturers or simply showing solidarity, you‘re treated as a threat.

They want people to be too afraid to take action, but that strategy is backfiring, because every time they try to suppress our movement, it only exposes their desperation, and it certainly strengthens my resolve. I think it probably strengthens our collective resolve to carry on and double down on our efforts.

Rather than be deterred by the UK’s increasing police state, Dindar says he has stepped up his campaigning in recent months and drawing public attention to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which includes a consumer boycott across a range of goods and outletsL

BDS remains one of the most effective tools that we have to resist the corporation’s complicity with apartheid, occupation and war crimes, companies like Sainsbury’s that stock products from firms that profit from the theft of Palestinian land and the slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.

By highlighting that and by refusing to buy those products, we send a really powerful message that we won’t be complicit in genocide, war crimes, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and displacement.

I feel particularly strongly as a healthcare professional. Who knows how many nurses and doctors have been slaughtered, sniped, bombed, set on fire and tortured by Israel this past year? I’ve worked all over the world as a nurse, including in the Middle East, and human life is sacrosanct and to be protected at all costs. When the person doing that is the one that’s targeted, or the profession that’s doing that is the profession that’s targeted, that’s chilling.’

Dindar made a point of thanking the many people who supported him:

Being part of the local PSC group has really got me through the last year,’ he said. ‘Without that solidarity and support, it would have been a very different scenario. I’d also like to thank from the bottom of my heart everyone who donated to my defence fund.

It was so heartening to feel the solidarity and support from the scores of people who donated and I am sure they will be happy that what’s left of the fund will be going directly to support our friends in Al-Mawasi, Gaza. Our town has long-standing friendship links with the people there and any defence costs that are returned to me by the court will also be going to Al-Mawasi.

In which case, if this prosecution achieves anything at all, it would be to help to raise funds for our friends in Al Mawasi. I haven’t seen a single supermarket do anything to help the people of Gaza to date. Shame on them all.

Other anti-genocide activists continue to face the threat of imprisonment for resisting the mass murder of civilians. Brighton Jewish author Tony Greenstein, Jersey activist Natalie Strecker and journalist Richard Medhurst have all been charged under the Starmer regime’s misuse of the Terrorism Act, with potential sentences of up to fourteen years – to the silence of so-called ‘mainstream’ journalists. In other cases, the state has used the draconian search powers of badly-written terror legislation to arrest activists but then charged them with non-terror offences.

However, probably as a reaction to the welcome frequency with which juries are returning not-guilty verdicts and judges are throwing out feeble cases, the state is ‘making the process the punishment’ in many cases by drawing out custody and restrictive bail conditions – including holding more than a dozen young activists in prison for more than a year before trial – while remaining stubbornly silent on Israel’s continual war crimes and contempt for international law and materially assisting in them.

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