ANIMAL rights extremists have opened a violent campaign against BAA, the company that runs most of Britain’s big airports, for its role in importing live animals for laboratory research.

Attackers have caused damage worth tens of thousands of pounds to the homes and vehicles of senior managers at BAA and other firms they claim are involved in importing animals.

Each year, thousands of mice, birds, monkeys and other animals are imported through airports for use in medical experiments.

An anti-import campaign was launched in December by a protest group called Gateway to Hell with co-ordinated demonstrations at Heathrow and Manchester airports. The campaign is targeting BAA, Air France, Air Mauritius and the Dover Port Authority. Air Mauritius denies it imports animals.

The group is linked to Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac), which has co-ordinated years of protests against Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a medical testing company based near Cambridge.

Four days after the new campaign began, unknown assailants attacked the homes and vehicles of five air transport executives including Margaret Ewing, 49, group finance director of BAA.

In all five attacks, homes were spray-painted and a total of 14 cars vandalised with paint-stripper or by having their tyres slashed.

Three cars in Ewing’s drive were badly damaged. Graffiti was daubed on the walls of her home saying: “You are now a target for us, you will not win.”

Ewing, who is married with children, said last week: “They did some criminal damage, which was very upsetting, and my family are simply trying to get over what happened.”

BAA held a meeting with police last week to discuss security for its staff. The company has altered records kept at Companies House to remove the home addresses of its directors on security grounds. This is not infallible — last week it was possible to obtain online archives with home addresses.

Others attacked on the same night as Ewing included John Hextall, 48, a director of UTi, a freight-forwarding company. UTi believes its directors were targeted because it had delivered four shipments of vaccine from Heathrow to HLS, which uses animals to test products on behalf of drug companies.

Other UTi directors have received threatening letters from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) at their home addresses warning of “more visible signs of action” if the firm did not halt trade with HLS. As a result, UTi has said it will no longer do business with HLS.

Other attacks have been launched against directors of Benair and the Charles Kendall Group, both of which are freight companies. UPS, which has also worked with HLS, has seen demonstrations at its depots, including those in Crawley, Peterborough and Coventry. Benair issued a statement after the attack denying it had ever had any connection with importing live animals.

Last night Brian Cass, managing director of HLS, said the new attacks were not just directed against his company, but were aimed at stopping all animals coming into the country for medical research.

“This is aimed at companies, universities and the entire medical research community,” said Cass. “The government needs urgently to put serious resources into combating these people.”

A spokeswoman for the Research Defence Society, which represents users of animals in experiments, said: “A lot of animals are bred within the UK and quite often within the facilities where they are used. Certain animals, such as specialist transgenic strains of mice, have to be imported. Certain species of primate cannot be bred in the UK because conditions are not right.”

She added that 85% of the animals used in 2.8m experiments each year are mice and rats.

A spokesman for the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit, a police body that monitors the animal rights movement, said the Gateway to Hell campaign was closely connected to Shac. “It is linked to Shac by people who run the website,” he said.

The Gateway to Hell website is registered in Thailand in the name of a group based at the same address as Shac in Evesham, Worcestershire. Shac last week denied any knowledge of the connection.

Keith Mann, a spokesman for Gatewaytohell.net, said: “Once we have stopped the airports, which we will do before too long, it is going to be difficult for them to find other ways of bringing animals in.”

Mann, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 1994 for criminal damage and attempted arson, said the protest campaign was intending to expand to take on ports such as Dover.

Asked whether or not he condoned the attacks, Mann said: “It is an obvious extension to the campaign. The more the authorities clamp down on legitimate protest, as is happening through injunctions, it seems logical that people are going to resort to other kinds of tactics. They are effective, the proof is there.”

Additional reporting Brendan Malkin

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