(Article republished from LawEnforcementToday.com)
Police in Avon and Somerset announced last week that the activist, Xahra Saleem, 22, was charged with two counts of fraud related to two fundraising pages and is scheduled to appear before two court magistrates in Bristol in January, the Bristol Post reported.
The first count of fraud stems from a missing sum of money from a fund called the “Bristol Protesters Legal Fees” fund, set up after a statue of Edward Colston, a 17th century merchant and parliamentarian was toppled and pushed into Bristol Harbor in June 2020 after the death of career criminal George Floyd.
Floyd died from a combination of positional asphyxiation and drug intoxication which was complicated by other comorbidities. A Minneapolis police officer was convicted in his death.
As occurred in the United States, where anyone remotely related to the slave trade likewise saw their statues and memorials canceled, Colston became a target for the ire of far-left social justice warriors due to his connections to the slave trade, which at that time was a widely accepted practice.
Eventually, the practice was outlawed throughout the British Empire, the first such power to abolish slavery. As happened in the US during the Civil War, thousands of British soldiers lost their lives to shut down slave routes across the globe.
Colston’s statue wasn’t the only target of far left zealots, with statues and memorials honoring Sir Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, and the National War Memorial also being targeted for vandalism by unhinged vandals.
Four suspects in the vandalism of the Colston statue were acquitted by jury earlier this year after their attorneys made the absurd argument that they were on “the right side of history,” and the jury actually bought it.
In addition to being charged related to that incident, Saleem was also charged for fraud in relation to the “BristBLM” GoFundMe page that was established in June 2020 after donation money went missing.
The fundraising campaign had promised to donate proceeds to a local youth charity, Changing Your Mindset. That never happened, and the money instead was directed into Saleem’s wallet. The charity was supposed to send benefactors on a trip to West Africa. Saleem’s arrest came after the charity complained to law enforcement authorities.
Breitbart said that a spokesman for Avon and Somerset police stated, “A woman is due in court at the start of next year after the Crown Prosecution Service authorized charges following a fraud investigation.
“Xahra Saleem, 22, and from East London, has been charged with two counts of fraud by abuse of position. She is due before Bristol Magistrates Court on Tuesday, 3 January 2023.”
In one of the similar cases that took place in the United States, a Boston-based BLM activist, Monica Cannon-Grant, along with her husband Clark, were arrested for fraudulent use of funds allegedly raised for a BLM charity in that city, as reported by the Boston Globe.
Those funds were instead used for rent, shopping sprees, hotels, car rentals, meal deliveries and a vacation trip to Maryland. Our report on that case may be found here.
Likewise, the founders of Black Lives Matter have been investigated for using funds allegedly raised for social justice causes to instead pad their real estate portfolio. Our report on that may also be found here.
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