14/03/03

Thirty B52 Support Vehicles Disabled at RAF Fairford

Last night at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire two
Trident Ploughshares
activists disabled no less than thirty vehicles which
provide
essential
support to the US B52 bombers stationed there.

Freelance writer Margaret Jones (53), from Bristol,
and Quaker
activist
Paul Milling (58), from Birmingham, planned to stick
labels onto all
the
vehicles to warn they had been tampered with. They
carried with them
bags of sugar to contaminate the fuel, grinding paste
and treacle to
add
to the oil systems, spikes to puncture the tyres, and
crowbars &
hammers
to damage the vehicles. They reasoned the bombers
would be very
closely
guarded but guessed the “Achilles Heel†might be
the fleet of
specialist support vehicles which are used to service,
refuel, and
load
bombs onto the aircraft. The bombers have been
recently moved to the
Gloucestershire base and in the event of war will be
used to
“carpet-bomb†Iraq. Last night a group of the
aircraft took off
from
RAF Fairford on an exercise and were refuelled in the
air over
Northumberland.

In a phone call from Stroud Police Station early this
morning Margaret
Jones said: “We managed to carry out our planned
action very
successfully. We evaded the police patrols, cut
through the perimeter
fence, and got into the garages which were unguarded.
We managed to
disable some thirty vehicles. With our politicians out
of democratic
control it is up to ordinary citizens to stop the war
machine. I could
not bear the thought of these bombers taking off from
our country,
flying thousands of miles to Iraq, and dropping their
cargoes of death
on ordinary people. We felt we personally had to do
what we could to
stop them.â€

The spectacular disarmament action comes just three
days after Trident
Ploughshares activist Ulla Roder inflicted severe
damage, estimated in
millions of pounds, to a Tornado jet at RAF Leuchars
in Fife.