The Crown actor faces police interview over pro-Palestinian rally

Actor Khalid Abdalla says he has been instructed to attend a police interview following a pro-Palestinian protest in January.

Abdalla, who performed Dodi Fayed in Netflix sequence The Crown, mentioned on social media he had obtained a letter from the Metropolitan Police on Thursday.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed to the BBC that eight folks had been “invited to be interviewed below warning at a police station” as a part of an “ongoing investigation into alleged breaches of Public Order Act situations on Saturday 18 January”.

In an Instagram put up, Abdalla mentioned it remained to be seen if fees would consequence, including that “the appropriate to protest is below assault on this nation”.

Abdalla, who additionally starred in United 93, The Kite Runner and The Day of the Jackal, is certainly one of Hollywood’s most outspoken actors on the Gaza-Israel conflict. He has publicly referred to as for a everlasting ceasefire.

The actor has attended a number of pro-Palestinian demos, together with the one on 18 January he will likely be interviewed by the police about.

And he was a signatory to the Artists for Palestine UK open letter to the BBC in February, criticising the company’s choice to tug a documentary about kids’s lives in Gaza after it found its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official.

Abdalla will not be the primary public determine to face a police interview following the January rally.

The previous Labour chief Jeremy Corbyn and former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have already been questioned by officers.

The Met has not recognized the pair however mentioned on the time that two males, aged 75 and 73, had subsequently been “launched pending additional investigations”.

A static rally involving a number of thousand folks came about in Whitehall after police blocked plans to carry a march from Portland Place, close to the headquarters of the BBC.

Police mentioned situations had been clearly communicated that these participating within the protest ought to stay in Whitehall.

“Regardless of this, a big group made its manner from Whitehall into Trafalgar Sq. and in some circumstances tried to go additional.”

Police mentioned that quite a lot of folks in that group have been arrested on suspicion of breaching the situations – and that to date, 21 had been charged.

The Palestinian Solidarity Marketing campaign, which organised the protest, mentioned: “What’s claimed by the police as justification for this large overreach of their powers is an entire misrepresentation of what came about, not simply on the day however beforehand.”

And it added: “We demand that the Metropolitan Police halt any prosecutions or proceedings in opposition to these concerned on this solely peaceable protest.”