Man charged after woman and four horses killed in crash

A 60-year-old man has been arrested and charged after a woman and four horses died following a crash between a car and a van in Renfrewshire.Emergency services were called to the incident involving a Mercedes A-class and a Man box van on the A737 near the village of Howwood at about 03:10 on 23 September 2024.There had been reports of six horses running loose at the time of the collision. Police said four of the horses died after being struck by vehicles.A 59-year-old woman, who was a passenger in the Mercedes, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The 52-year-old driver of the car, his 33-year-old passenger and a 59-year-old man driving the van were all taken to hospital for treatment.A 52-year-old woman has also been charged in connection with the incident.

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BBC News

35 minutes ago

• BBC News

Harry Dunn: What happened in the case of teenage motorcyclist?

Almost six years since the death of motorcyclist Harry Dunn outside a US military base in the UK, an investigative review has criticised the way Northamptonshire Police handled the driver of the car involved in the collision, US diplomat Anne Sacoolas, was handed an eight-month jail term, suspended for 12 months, after pleading guilty to criminal did a road collision end up with the victim's family losing confidence in the police and the Northamptonshire force being criticised in an official report? Who was Harry Dunn? Mr Dunn's mother, Charlotte Charles, said the 19-year-old was "larger than life" with a "great" sense of 27 August 2019, he died in a crash near RAF Croughton, Northamptonshire, after Sacoolas's car struck his motorbike moments after she left the car was driving on the right-hand side of the road when it should have been on the had diplomatic immunity asserted on her behalf by the US administration. They then both left the UK. Who is Anne Sacoolas? Sacoolas was described in the 2025 investigative review of the case as "a married mother of three" who had "held a US drivers' licence and had done so since the age of 15".At the time of the collision in 2019, her husband Jonathan was a US intelligence officer and the couple and their three children had been in the UK for a few family's four-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son had been in the car with their mother when the collision happened. They had been attending a barbecue at RAF a court hearing in Virginia in 2021, a barrister said that Ms Sacoolas herself had been "employed by an intelligence agency in the US" at the time of the crash and her work was "especially a factor" in her leaving the immunity gives some people, such as foreign diplomats and, in some cases, their families, protection from arrest and prosecution in their host had, however, been a secret agreement between the UK and US governments that allowed for the prosecution of diplomats for crimes committed outside their duties but gave their families greater protection. Why did the crash cause a diplomatic row? Following the fatal crash, Mr Dunn's parents Mrs Charles and Tim Dunn, aided by spokesperson Radd Seiger, began a campaign to have the case brought to led them to the White House and a meeting in October 2019 with Donald Trump, then in his first term as US the meeting, he revealed Sacoolas was in the next room, but the family felt "ambushed" and did not meet December 2019, the UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) authorised Northamptonshire Police to charge Sacoolas with causing Mr Dunn's an extradition request for her to be brought to the UK was rejected by the US the then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, when she was Foreign Secretary, raised the case with the US government. How did Anne Sacoolas end up in court? In the absence of extradition, the family launched a civil claim for damages against Sacoolas and her husband in the December 2021, the CPS said Sacoolas would appear at court in the UK to face unspecified a month later it said the court date had been postponed to allow "ongoing" discussions with the US national's legal a change in the law meant Sacoolas was able to appear in court via video-link and she pleaded guilty on screen at the Old Bailey to causing death by careless driving on 20 October 2022. The 45-year-old was originally charged with causing death by dangerous driving, but the CPS accepted her plea to the lesser was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment suspended for 12 months, once again appearing via video-link after the US government advised Sacoolas not to attend her sentencing was also disqualified from driving for 12 months. What did Harry Dunn's family say after the hearing? Mrs Charles said: "Getting to court and getting to where we are now has been the most monumental thing for me because I can talk to him now and tell him we've done it. Promise complete."Mr Dunn Snr said: "I go up to the crash site quite a lot - I went there a couple of days ago to strim and put some daffodils in ready for the spring."Hopefully we've given hope to other families that they can do the same as us and get justice and believe and fight because it will happen in the end, it will happen." What has happened since the sentencing? A second funeral for Mr Dunn was held in March 2024 after human tissue was found on clothing returned to the inquest in June 2024 concluded Mr Dunn died as a result of a road traffic collision, and the coroner called for driver training to be given to US personnel working in the UK. Northamptonshire Police launched an investigation into how the case was handled from the beginning. What did the investigation find? The review, written by a former senior police officer, made 38 separate found that, while officers believed Sacoolas was in a state of shock at the time, she "could and should have been arrested" after the also revealed that Mr Dunn was subjected to drug testing after the collision, but Sacoolas was review said none of the officers at the scene managed to gather footage from their body-worn cameras. It was also very critical of the chief constable at the time, Nick Adderley, who was sacked for gross misconduct in 2024 for lying about his career in the Royal said he made "erroneous statements" about Sacoolas's immunity status, and should not have criticised the family's spokesperson, Radd Seiger, at a press conference. The force has apologised for failing to "do the very best for the victim".Mrs Charles said: "I'm absolutely bewildered that the most fundamental of policing was not carried out. I'm struggling to get my head around that."Mr Seiger said Mr Adderley "nearly derailed" attempts to get justice for Mr Dunn but that Northamptonshire Police, under a new chief constable, was now "headed in the right direction". Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.

Times

41 minutes ago

• Times

Sarah Champion: I'm called racist for taking on grooming gangs

Sarah Champion did not go into politics to wage war against child sex abuse rings or become a voice for vulnerable teenage girls preyed on by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin who groomed, trafficked and raped them. When she became the Labour MP for Rotherham she did not know they existed. 'I had been running the local children's hospice as CEO when I became an MP in 2012 and I remember reading an article about this 15-year-old Rotherham girl who had a baby by any of three different men and was seen as a little scrubber, and I thought that's not right. Then a girl was found dead in a river, and they said she'd gone mad. Finally, a young white girl came to us with a poorly baby and her boyfriend was a much older Asian man; the relationship seemed odd.' Champion became increasingly uneasy that she did not know what was going on in her own constituency. 'At one of my first council meetings there was an item under 'risky business' and no one would explain it … Then I was in parliament and there was a session at a select committee on child sexual exploitation and Jayne Senior [a social worker] was giving evidence and it was horrifying, I felt mortified that no one seemed to care. Afterwards she suggested we meet on a canal boat in secrecy, and she told me what had been going on.' Slowly, survivors began to contact Champion. 'They were all ages. I met someone in her early eighties in Rotherham who described it happening to her by a Pakistani-origin man when she was younger. I met another woman at the back of Costa Coffee in her early twenties who went through everything in detail. Gradually I was collecting all this information, but I didn't know what to do.' Senior gave her a list of the men she had reported as abusers and the list of people she thought were complicit in the cover-up. 'I went to the police and people in the council saying I had serious concerns about a number of people, but I didn't get any responses. It was hard to know who to trust and I was nervous of giving away girls' names away. My life became one of shadows and pseudonyms.' • Baroness Casey: I feel rage on behalf of the abused girls This was not a race issue for Champion. 'To me this was just child abuse. It wasn't an ethnicity thing. The names weren't typically white English names, but what mattered was they were perpetrators of horrendous crimes. I'm a sloppy lefty to my core; I believe in equality and diversity. I just saw them as criminals.' The MP strongly believes Rotherham police, councillors and social workers should have called out these men as abusers decades ago. 'If they had taken these cases seriously when they began being reported in the 1960s, rather than telling these women they were silly young girls, then there wouldn't have been the boil of frustration there is now. The criminals would have gone to jail, the story wouldn't have escalated across the country, the Pakistani community wouldn't be vilified as though all of them are walking around intent on abusing white girls. They have done a massive disservice to this country.' In no way, Champion says, should these young girls be expected to take the blame. 'I remember when I was 15 and my friends and I were so excited when one of us got an older boyfriend with a car, some children are enamoured by older men, they like feeling special — before it all goes wrong — but we need to protect them.' The Labour MP stresses that she does not think this is about paedophiles. 'This is about pubescent girls aged 10 to 15 who are being groomed, they aren't little kids, and that is partly why it is overlooked as there is confusion over the age of consent, but it is 16 and for a reason.' • Gangs raped 'lost' girls because no one cared Watching these abused children struggle, as they grow up, has changed her mind about prostitution. 'I would make it a criminal offence for men to buy sex and decriminalise the women. I shifted my view largely because of the girls in Rotherham. When they were no longer pubescent and their value started to drop, they were so damaged and desperate, many were forced to turn to prostitution. They didn't have the capacity for consent, either because of the violence or drugs or alcohol. 'Once I'd been told about it, I would see it everywhere walking round Rotherham, I thought how can everyone else not see. Then I began reading reports round the country and thinking that's another grooming gang, yet none of them called them out.' She started to believe there was a pattern to cases being reported not just in Rotherham but Rochdale, Telford and Oxford. In 2017, after the conviction of a sex-grooming gang in Newcastle upon Tyne who were largely of Pakistani origin, Champion cracked. 'I did the BBC Today programme because I became so frustrated. They called the day before and I said I am going to say they are Pakistani gangs and they were very concerned. I went on and it was fine, there were no recriminations, just supportive messages. Then The Sun got in touch, and I wrote a piece for them. And all hell broke loose.' Champion had written: 'Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.' She quit as shadow equalities minister under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, apologising for the 'extremely poor choice of words in [the] article'. She initially claimed her piece had been edited and 'stripped of nuance' but a spokesman for The Sun, which is published by News UK, the parent company of The Times, said: 'Sarah Champion's column … was approved by her team and her adviser twice contacted us thereafter to say she was 'thrilled' with the piece and it 'looked great'.' Champion later said in an interview: 'What I'm really interested in is misogyny. It occurs in many different forms, but the most obvious forms are happening within some ethnic minority communities. I'm thinking female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour-based violence and this type of child exploitation.' She was immediately branded a racist and for the past few years the abuse hurled at her from all sides has been relentless. 'It's the anniversary of [her fellow Yorkshire MP] Jo Cox's death next week, I was coming through the Tube yesterday and this guy clocked me and put his hand in his pocket and I thought he was going to stab me. You have to recalibrate your head and accept that it is inevitable that someone is going to kill you. It's quite liberating, I am a fatalist. I went through all the panicking and alarms and it eats you up so you just have to resign yourself. The MP David Amess was also a friend so I know what can happen.' • How the child sex grooming gangs scandal unfolded over 20 years Amess was killed in his Southend West constituency. Is it worth Champion risking her life to keep raising the issue of grooming gangs? 'No. But I can't help it.' Does she now wish she hadn't become an MP? 'I genuinely can't answer that. I have tried to become a voice for those who don't have one. But the personal toll? It's living hell. The violence and threat of violence has got marginally better, but it has been horrendous.' The proliferation of grooming gangs dominated by Pakistani-heritage men, she tells me, is like the Post Office scandal and the contaminated blood scandal. 'Everyone now knows but no one does anything. The Times has been amazing and a few others. Once you start getting really involved you can't stop because it is such a devastating story. But there aren't 20 people behind me saying, 'I will take the baton, you have a break now'. The sacrifices and compromises you make to do this aren't worth it for most people.' Does she still worry even now after Baroness Casey of Blackstock's 200-page report was published this week into grooming gangs that she will be seen as a racist for saying they are predominantly made up of men from Pakistani families? 'I think we can now say more, I wrote a letter to The Times this week using the words Pakistani heritage, but I still thought long and hard about doing that in case people misconstrued it.' She must find it hard that it took Elon Musk tweeting to get politicians to focus on the abuse again. 'I jokingly say I will dance with the devil if it gets the ultimate aim and that is the closest I have come to doing it. His intervention has promoted more discussion … But I get upset when the right uses what has happened to these girls as a political tool.' Many on the left have warned that people like her are stirring up racial tensions and the bigots will use it to hound ethnic minorities. 'Trying to hide what is happening isn't helping anyone. I had a Pakistani female constituent come to me because she had gone to the police about her husband who had been abusing young girls the same age as her children. She had then been completely ostracised by her community for bringing shame on them and was getting terrorised in her home and wasn't getting enough protection … They must live with these men. How those in authority think not dealing with the crime is helping the Pakistani community is mind-blowing to me.' New generations are also suffering, she says. 'I started getting young women coming very distressed because they were having their babies taken off them because social services had decided they were unfit mothers. They would tell me 'I think it is because my boyfriend is Pakistani, and the council is racist'. But it's almost the opposite. The council was afraid to call these men out and saw the victims as having made bad lifestyle choices.' Does she feel that this is as much a class problem as a race problem? 'I don't think it is just working-class girls who have been sucked in, but they are less likely to know how to raise their voices and get people to listen. I've sat with their mothers who say, 'What do I do? I can't chain my daughter up.' One of the groomers' methods is to divide families and get kids put into care so they are even easier prey. I know one parent who had the money and could send her child to a relative out of the region to break the cycle of abuse. So, if you have some cash, you have more options.' But many remain stuck with the perpetrators of their misery, living in the same town. 'One of the girls who first talked to me said that the same gang members were coming up to her with her 12-year-old and taunting her, saying, 'Your daughter is about ready now,' and she was freaking out.' What haunts Champion most is that this kind of horrendous abuse is still going on over a decade after she became MP and tried to raise awareness. 'This is not in the past tense, we are still dealing with these cases in isolation, but they must be linked they are so similar.'' In her epic campaign to get attention for the victims, Champion has felt very alone. 'Andrew Norfolk, the late Times journalist, and Jayne Senior have been my two staunchest allies. When this all broke again I still only had two MPs get in touch with me.' • Andrew Norfolk obituary: Times reporter who exposed grooming gangs I ask whether she misses Norfolk, who died last month. her eyes well up. 'I normally do 12 to 14-hour days here but when I found out he died I was floored. I came home at 10.30pm and I couldn't stop sobbing. He was the only one who I could just talk to about it all without fearing being accused of being racist. Neither of us wanted to be known for this. I'm seen by many as the racist Sarah Champion. It's awful. I'm the opposite.' She hasn't had any therapy or help. 'I trained as a shrink; I appreciate the value of it, but I am not at a point where I can unpack this because I have too much to do. Andrew and I would get in touch when we needed each other. It was the knowledge that there was someone who understood what was going on and didn't believe I was nuts.' Champion has no children of her own. 'That has helped, I have one step of separation,' she says. She doesn't feel angry just lonely. 'It's not helpful to be angry. I just feel deeply disappointed and frustrated and wanted people to be better. I want them to give their best and they aren't. They take the job title and don't give a shit. I don't know how they can turn a blind eye.' When Sir Keir Starmer agreed to a national inquiry this week, she was pleased but when she switched on social media, she saw she was being monstered from both sides. 'Either I have done too much or not enough, I'm now blamed by left and right. But I hope the inquiry can take up the challenge. It's important that they are going back over 800 cases. 'People in the UK are very tolerant, but at our core we want to see fairness. If something is seen as unfair, we start kicking off so the fact that the law wasn't applied here without fear or favour is a big issue; the fact that people paid to do a job failed to do it, and worse covered up abuse, that's a big issue.' Wherever Champion goes in the world now, people ask her about the grooming gangs, she says. 'Unless we are seen to be dealing with it, this smear is going to be on our country and our reputation for years.'

Telegraph

an hour ago

• Telegraph

RAF base's only defence against Palestine Action was 6ft wooden fence

For almost 80 years, RAF Brize Norton has been one of the country's most important military airfields, serving as an embarkation point for members of the Royal family and senior politicians as they fly around the globe. So one could be forgiven for expecting security around the Oxfordshire airbase to be watertight. In reality, however, things are a little more porous, with sections of the eight-mile perimeter protected only by a six-foot wooden fence that would not look out of place surrounding a suburban garden. In the early hours of Friday morning, two members of the protest group Palestine Action – which will now be proscribed as a terrorist organisation – took advantage of the seemingly lax defences to enter the airfield and attack two military aircraft. Video footage posted by the group showed two people using electric scooters to cross the base's runway. One can be seen approaching an aircraft and spray-painting its engine, before driving away down the empty airstrip. They were then able to disappear into the night, leaving the RAF red-faced and the Ministry of Defence to announce an urgent review of security. Brize Norton serves as the hub for UK strategic air transport and refuelling, including flights to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. It is also where the aircraft used by dignitaries, including the monarch and prime minister, are based. As would be expected, large parts of the base, especially near the gates, are surrounded by high metal fences topped with menacing-looking razor wire. The perimeter in these areas also bristles with security cameras and hi-tech CCTV to monitor the comings of goings of all personnel. Armed guards patrol the gates in a show of strength aimed at deterring anyone who has no lawful business. But just a short stroll along a grass verge, the barbed wire comes to an abrupt end, to be replaced by a panel fence that looks like it could have been purchased from a DIY store. The section in question is plain to see for anyone travelling the four miles between the villages of Carterton and Bampton along station road. Stretching for around 170 metres, it skirts along the end of the runway and is protected from the road by just a small line of wooden and concrete bollards. One resident said: 'I've lived in this area for years and every time I drive past the fence I think: 'That would be easy to break into'.' It is not topped with barbed wire or any other anti-climbing defences, and would provide little resistance to a determined terrorist with a spring in their step. There is even a hole in the fence at one point for anyone who cannot quite manage the climb. Red warning signs attached to the fence declare: 'No unauthorised access. Protected site under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Trespass on this site is a Criminal Offence. This site is also regulated by military bylaws.' At one end of the section, kennels belonging to the RAF Police's dog section are located. But, while a number of RAF Police vehicles were parked close by, there were no visible personnel patrols on Friday afternoon during the three hours that reporters from The Telegraph were at the site. On the other side of the fence, and just a short distance from the road, Airbus Voyager aircraft, the air-to-air refuellers targeted by Palestine Action, can be seen on the tarmac. Security for the Brize Norton airfield is the responsibility of the RAF Police and Military Provost Guard Service (MPGS), which secures Army, Navy and RAF bases. But former members have suggested the unit is poorly funded and does not have the resources to effectively secure such large sites. One RAF source told The Telegraph the level of security across all military was not up to standard, and that 'more dogs, more coppers and more money' was needed to properly secure the sensitive sites. 'We have barbed wire around the bases and cameras, but is its perimeter fence completely covered for the miles it takes up?' the source said. 'No, because Brize Norton is f---ing huge.' He added: 'If we could have another 50 coppers and 50 dogs the security at Brize Norton would improve. But is the security as tight at a fast jet base? Not really. 'To have watertight security at a base like Brize Norton, you'd have to invest countless people and god knows the amount of money. But maybe that's what we have to do now if this is the way things are going.' The source added: 'MPGS are responsible for recruiting the right people and getting them in the right places, but they haven't done that. ' It's a symptom of a lack of investment on security. We don't have tens of millions of pounds to put up CCTV across all the bases.' Another former military source added: 'The security at these non-nuclear bases can be very patchy. The perimeter fences are too long to be able to have them under surveillance 24 hours a day. 'But when Glastonbury's fence is harder to breach than RAF Brize Norton, you know you have an issue. 'While it may be challenging to secure an entire eight-mile perimeter, you would think they ought to be able to protect aircraft sitting on the runway. Someone's head is going to have to roll over this.'