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LONDON: A London court on Friday threw out a terror-related charge against a member of the Irish-language hip-hop group Kneecap.
Rapper Mo Chara, whose real name is Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, had been charged with a single count for waving a flag of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, banned in Britain as a terrorist organization, during a London concert last year.
But chief magistrate Paul Goldspring sitting at Woolwich Crown Court said the case should be thrown out following a technical error in the way the charge against the rapper was brought.
“These proceedings were instituted unlawfully and are null,” he said.
Kneecap has faced criticism for political statements seeming to glorify militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Hungary and Canada have previously banned the group.
Kneecap has accused critics of trying to silence the band because of its support for the Palestinian cause throughout the war in Gaza. The band says it doesn’t support Hezbollah and Hamas nor condone violence.
Ó hAnnaidh, 27, had claimed the prosecution was politically motivated effort to silence the band’s support for Palestinians.

TOKYO: A Ukrainian YouTuber with more than 6.5 million subscribers has been arrested in Japan after livestreaming himself trespassing in a house in the Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone, police and media said Friday.
The arrest, which reportedly occurred in an area declared a no-go zone after the 2011 nuclear disaster, is the latest in a string of incidents involving fame-seeking foreigners behaving badly in Japan.
Two other Ukrainians were also arrested for entering the unoccupied house in Okuma Town in Fukushima prefecture on Wednesday morning, Fukushima police said.
“Police officers discovered the suspects following information provided by a citizen and arrested them in the act,” the official said.
All three suspects admitted to the charges, according to TV Asahi, citing police.
The broadcaster showed a clip taken from the YouTube livestream, where the three men made tea inside the home and examined objects apparently left behind by the people who lived there.
After the Fukushima disaster, which was triggered by a huge earthquake and subsequent tsunami, 12 percent of the prefecture was off-limits and around 165,000 people fled their homes either under evacuation orders or voluntarily.
The radiation that blanketed the region forced people to abandon everything.
Although many areas have now been declared safe, there are still some deemed dangerous, including where the Ukrainians were filming, Asahi said.
Former Ukrainian ambassador to Japan Sergiy Korsunsky said on social media site X that he wanted to apologize for the incident on behalf of the Ukrainians arrested.
“This should not be happening,” he said.
It comes after Japanese police arrested a US livestreamer known as Johnny Somali in 2023 for allegedly trespassing onto a construction site.
According to video footage, Ismael Ramsey Khalid, 23, wore a facemask and repeatedly shouted “Fukushima” to construction workers who urged him to leave the site, police said, referring to the stricken nuclear power plant.
Another clip shows Khalid, who describes himself as a former child soldier, harassing train passengers with references to the US atomic bombings of Japan in 1945.
An unprecedented number of tourists are flocking to Japan, but some residents have become fed up with unruly behavior.
The “Japanese first” Sanseito, which has tapped into growing concerns over over-tourism and immigration, made strong gains in an upper house election this year.