British police were keeping tight-lipped on Wednesday over an alleged plot by fathers’ rights extremists to kidnap Prime Minister Tony Blair’s five-year-old son, Leo.
The plan, apparently in its early stages, was revealed by The Sun newspaper and confirmed by police sources to the BBC.
The Sun said the plan was hatched by ”extremist sympathisers” of the Fathers 4 Justice group, which mounts high-profile campaigns for fathers’ rights to their children following custody battles.
Britain’s biggest-selling daily said ”vigilante dads” aimed to kidnap Leo and hold him hostage for a short period to ”highlight the plight of fathers denied access to their kids”.
Both London’s metropolitan police and Blair’s Downing Street office were refusing to confirm or deny the story.
A met police spokesperson said: ”We’re not commenting on this at all. We don’t discuss matters of security. We’re not prepared to discuss this in any way, shape or form.”
The BBC’s source said police were not convinced that those involved in the plot had the ability to carry it out.
The Sun cited an unnamed security source as the basis for its dispatch. Blair and his wife, Cherie, were said to have been told and were ”concerned”, it added.
Protection for the Blairs and their four children — Euan, 22 on Thursday, Nicholas (21), 17-year-old Kathryn and Leo — was said to have been reviewed after the alleged plot was uncovered just before Christmas.
Detectives from the met’s special branch — which has among its functions investigating extremism and terrorism — have been monitoring the ”lunatic fringe” of Fathers 4 Justice, The Sun said.
Fathers 4 Justice founder Matt O’Connor said: ”There’s evidence to support the fact that there was something going on, because SO13 officers [the met’s anti-terrorist unit] had visited some ex-members of the organisation over the Christmas period. That had set alarm bells ringing.”
O’Connor said contacts in the force had said over the past few weeks that SO13 ”were threatening to shoot people if they did anything in the region of Downing Street”.
But he insisted the group knew nothing about a plot and condemned the idea of kidnapping ”unreservedly”.
”We do peaceful, direct action with a dash of humour. We’re in the business of uniting dads with their kids, not separating them,” he said. ”We have to consider the future of the organisation if our name is being associated with such actions.”
Graham Dudman, The Sun‘s managing editor, told the BBC: ”The police took this very seriously because, of course, Fathers 4 Justice have been involved in some pretty spectacular stunts.”
Fathers 4 Justice has staged a number of high-profile stunts around Britain in recent years to highlight what it deems to be unfair child-custody laws.
Its demonstrations — in which protesters are often dressed as superheroes such as Batman and Robin — are usually peaceful and involve breaching security and occupying notable landmarks.
Activists have in the past egged Blair’s car, and scaled St Paul’s cathedral and the London Eye Ferris wheel. They once got into the public gallery at the Houses of Parliament and hit Blair with purple powder during a speech.
A protester even climbed on to a ledge at Buckingham Palace, the official London residence of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
The rarely seen Leo George Blair has always been a focus of media attention, being the first baby born to a serving British prime minister for more than 150 years.
The Blairs have sought to keep him, like his siblings, out of the media spotlight.
Just weeks after the birth, the Blairs issued the first of several calls for privacy after pictures of a sleeping Leo taken by a group of schoolchildren were printed.
The Sun said exact details of the plot were not revealed and no arrests had been made.
But police believe the conspirators were from a breakaway element of the group who believe the mainstream protesters are not radical enough, it added. — Sapa-AFP