British anti-terrorist police announced Thursday investigating videos shot in concerts North Irish rappers of Kneecap, suspected of having made remarks encouraging violence against conservative parliamentarians and supporting Hamas.
The agents of this unit, who examined two videos shot in 2023 and 2024 exhumed in recent days, “determined that there were enough reasons to investigate possible offenses,” London police said in a statement.
On a video broadcast online, one of the rappers seems to shout “Go Hamas, go the Hezbollah” during a concert in London last year. On the other, dated November 2023, a person on stage declares that a “good Tory (member of the British Conservative Party) is a dead Tory. Kill your deputy”.
The Kemi Badenoch conservative leaders demanded the group’s ban and elected officials called to deprogram the rappers from the legendary Glastonbury festival at the end of June.
The group has already been dismissed from a festival in Cornwall, Eden Sessions, and three concerts were canceled in Germany next September.
The rappers assured Monday evening “not supporting and never supported Hamas or Hezbollah”. “We condemn all attacks on civilians, still,” they said on social networks.
“We also refute the idea that we would seek to encourage violence against a deputy or an individual,” they added, apologizing to the families of two parliamentarians, the Labor and the other conservative, murdered in 2016 and 2021. Families had said that they felt injured by their words.
During their mid-April concert at the Californian Festival of Coachella, the rappers of Belfast had projected on a giant screen the messages “Israel commits a genocide against the Palestinian people”, “Fuck Israel, release Palestine”, arousing strong reactions.
On Wednesday, several big names in music like Pulp, Fontaines DC or Massive Attack signed a letter in support of Kneecap, targets according to them of a “political repression” and a “clear and concerted attempt at censorship and deprogramming”.
The rappers, who made themselves known worldwide with the release in 2024 of their album “Fine Art” and a survived docu-fiction, “Kneecap”, are distinguished by their punk energy. The trio recruits in English and Irish and defends its language as an “anti -colonial” cry in the face of British power.
CLA/Alm/ybl
