Pro-Palestinian activists who harassed MP appeal sentence

Pontypridd MP Alex Davies-Jones said she felt "scared, intimidated, threatened" by the interaction

Two pro-Palestinian activists found guilty of harassing a UK government minister have appeared in court to appeal against their convictions.

Ayeshah Behit, 31, and Hida Ahmed, 26, were found guilty of the charge against Alex Davies-Jones, the Labour MP for Pontypridd, in June.

They had filmed a confrontation with the politician, who had been campaigning in Treforest, Rhondda Cynon Taf, in the lead-up to the general election in June last year.

Both women appeared at an appeal hearing at Merthyr Crown Court on Friday, denying they harassed Davies-Jones, a justice minister.

Ahmed, a final year architecture student at Cardiff University with no previous convictions, was handed a 12-month conditional discharge in June.

Behit, who had a previous conviction relating to a protest in Cardiff last year, received an 18-month conditional discharge.

While out campaigning, Davies-Jones said she saw Behit and Ahmed with leaflets suggesting she was a "full-blown supporter of this genocide" - referring to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Behit and Ahmed also put posters on the Labour office in Pontypridd - the base of Davies-Jones' campaign for the general election - that referred to politicians "enabling genocide".

Davies-Jones told the court on Friday she was aware of what was on the leaflets and had initially approached the defendants trying to defuse the situation.

She said the defendants quizzed her on her voting record, with them asking why she had abstained on a ceasefire vote in the House of Commons.

Davies-Jones said she had not abstained, but had been out of the country at the time.

The MP ended the conversation with the pair, telling the court it was clear that they were not going to be satisfied with her answers, describing the situation as "quite confrontational".

"They started to follow us down the street, shouting quite awful things at us," she said.

She described feeling "scared, intimidated and threatened", and she and her team hid in a university building to get away from them.

She also said she decided to stop her campaigning, aware of what had happened to to other MPs, including the murder of Jo Cox.

Ayeshah Behit (left) and Hiba Ahmed (right, long dark hair and light brown jumper) were convicted of harassing Labour MP Alex Davies-Jones

An edited video of her interaction with the pair was later posted on social media, with suggestions she was Islamophobic.

"The consequences of that [video] were severe and still are," she said, adding she had experienced "relentless targeting with abuse, harassment, threats".

"I have had to increase security at my home, office, when I'm out in public.

"It's constant - it's changed everything, it's changed the entire way in which I work."

Behit said they had only been there that day to hand out leaflets, and were not "at all" aware Davies-Jones was due to be there.

Behit did not deny shouting after the MP, but said they had not continued following Davies-Jones and her team.

She also denied having knocked on doors after the canvassers, insisting they had only put leaflets through letterboxes and talked to people in the street.

However, she admitted placing leaflets under the windscreen wipers of a vehicle owned by a canvasser, as well as posters and stickers on a bus stop and on Davies-Jones' office.

She dismissed the argument from Nik Strobl, appearing for the prosecution, that they had been deliberately targeting Ms Davies-Jones.

"It was an insane coincidence," she said.

Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke, the recorder of Cardiff, adjourned the appeal until 29 August, when Ahmed will give evidence.