How woman with coconut placard was tracked down, taken to court  and acquitted |BBC news live | Google news live - video Dailymotion

Marieha Hussain had marched for three hours with her family, and the children with them were getting tired. #google #news #livenews #googlenews

Transcript

00:00Maria Hossein had marched for three hours with her family, and the children with them

00:04were getting tired.

00:05''We opened some snacks to keep them going,'' she said.

00:09They were part of a 300,000-strong group at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in central

00:15London on 11 November 2023.

00:18Then, somebody from my side of the street where I was standing called out and asked,

00:23''Can I take a picture of your placard?''

00:26This wasn't the first time she'd been asked for a picture.

00:29Her family's placards, she said, had drawn a lot of attention.

00:34On one side of the placard was a cartoon of Suella Braverman, then the Home Secretary,

00:39dressed like Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians.

00:43Ms Hossein held up the sign and posed.

00:46The voice called out, ''No, not that one, can you turn it around please?''

00:51And I did.

00:53And that was it, her account was told to Westminster Magistrates' Court this week during her two-day

00:58trial on a charge of a racially aggravated public order offence.

01:02She was accused of this offence, of which she was found not guilty on Friday, because

01:07of what was on the other side of that placard.

01:11It was a drawing of a palm tree with coconuts falling off it, pasted over two of those coconuts

01:16were the faces of Ms Braverman and of the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

01:21At the heart of this case was the word, ''coconut'' and whether it could be considered racially

01:26abusive.