The pub garden paramilitaries
Sipping pints and gazing at a map, they could be a group of ramblers. But, as our special investigation reveals, they’re just one cell in a deeply worrying new organisation that’s only open to former service men and women
THE three men and a woman intently studying maps as they sat around a picnic table in a Devon pub garden might easily have passed for ramblers planning an outing. Nearby, holidaymakers enjoying the last of the evening sunshine watched their children take turns on a slide. Had they studied the seemingly harmless quartet in the corner sipping pints, they might have concluded they weren’t quite so innocent after all.
The Mail on Sunday observed as one of the group demonstrated to the others how to use a powerful Baofeng walkie-talkie, before glancing over his shoulder and furtively returning it to his rucksack. Each spoke in notably low voices, their conversation liberally sprinkled with acronyms – the kind favoured by the military.
The event on Tuesday was the inaugural meeting of the Devon ‘cell’ of a newly formed 200-strong private army whose disturbing plans to cause mayhem across Britain can today be exposed.
Binding its members is an opposition to child vaccinations and Covid passports, and what they perceive as a general erosion of freedoms, along with unspecified anger towards the Government, which they claim is run by criminals.
‘The military will be the enemy… and we’ll take them out’
Many are quick to embrace and advance conspiracy theories, including a fear that by the year’s end there will martial law on the streets of Britain.
But what distinguishes this group – Veterans 4 Freedom (V4F) – from those who have already spent months protesting is that they are all former servicemen and women. In their latest incarnation, they are now paramilitaries, each assigned one of 16 operational ‘cells’ based on location. There is also a secret leadership command.
Because of their Armed Forces training, many are skilled with weapons and, more troubling still, have an apparent willingness to use them. While the group’s aims sometimes seem amorphous, members speak on Telegram, an encrypted app they use to communicate plans for violent insurrection and ‘of a complete system change, from the top down’.
For instance, one member calling himself Ash Styles posted last week: ‘If it comes to an insurgency, the military will become enemy combatants and we’ll take them out using dirty tricks. They are identifiable by wearing a uniform. We are not.’
Another veteran using the name Scorpio Rising suggested: ‘No more leaders, no more royals, no more money system, no more slavery… Government replaced with administration only doing the bidding of the people.’ Others share tips on how to convert rifles to make them legal and of using crossbows because they are already legal. Targeting vaccine centres and ‘bringing the fight to the people sticking the needle in’ is another preoccupation. At least one member – Mikey P – shared photographs among colleagues of vaccine centre workers and their car registration numbers. Another suggested putting trackers on workers’ cars adding: ‘Follow them home and do it there.’
A member called ‘Fort UK’ says: ‘People will drop like flies this winter, that’s when we might see UN troops and martial law on our streets. I really think this winter will be the darkest we’ve known.’
This prompts a response from Ash Styles: ‘It’s our duty to attack them – ANY foreign troops on our streets, and they’re classed as enemy combatants.’
Another common enemy is the police. One ex-serviceman, Paul, posted last week: ‘Be good if “someone” slashed tyres of pig cars all over the country.’ Elsewhere, another member appears to suggest sabotaging vaccine stores across Britain, saying that if one ‘were to suffer an accident… might be a start’. In his response, a leader says: ‘I know one place… Won’t say on here but if people want a private chat I’ll organise it.’ Another member, calling himself Blaine Robinson, says: ‘When the vax [vaccine] starts becoming forced we need to start disrupting lines. Power, supply chains, hitting the centres etc.’
Paranoid about infiltration, the group’s leaders are usually more circumspect about what they say, even on Telegram, which is popular among extremists and criminals due to its high levels of security.
The group plans to go public on
September 8 when it will meet in Hyde Park in Central London to ‘march on Parliament’. Members – all of whom are vetted, having provided ‘proof of military service’ – will wear service ‘headdress’.
This protest, say the group’s leaders, must be peaceful to gain public support. In any case, as the group has emphasised in its recruitment publicity, it only advocates ‘legal forms of protest and resistance’. But in private, it is an altogether different story.
One of the leaders, a privately educated former Royal Marine commando who uses the name Bellzaac on Telegram and normally recommends caution, last week messaged: ‘We are f ****** cavalry. No one else is going to do what needs to be done when it gets messy. We know it’s going to happen, it’s not a matter of if.’
Another said: ‘We have to look military and the part, proud protectors of our oaths. This does not mean that in the future we need the same approach.’
But when the chatter becomes too inflammatory, Bellzaac encourages members to speak in private.
He also tells veterans that when things turn ugly ‘you will have your cells and local groups’ or ‘if you want to do something do it in your local cell’.
One member of the Devon cell, body-building fanatic ‘Jonno’, needed no encouragement, boasting to members last week: ‘Today I linked up with the Bristol movement. We shut down a vax centre – had the staff running out of the back door.’
His message was accompanied with a laughing emoji. A member of the same cell, who uses the pseudonym Pol MacAoidh, sent a message to Jonno and the others attending the pub meeting. ‘So tonight we are meeting f2f [face to face] in our local group,’ he wrote. ‘Establishing group ERVs [Emergency Rendezvous] and ones near each of our locales. Plus a lights out comms [communications] plan.’
After the gathering, he reported back, saying: ‘Great ideas for local action… Devon group also discussed blockading any supermarkets that require jab passports.
And QRF [Quick Reaction Force] could turn up at local schools if they are jib-jabbing.’
He then adds ominously: ‘I am all for taking note of who the complicit are. Register them on a list. RegisterCovidFraudOffender@Protonmail.com Like the nazi hunters did. That is all MPs, local councillors, chief constables, doctors, police officers. Any pos [person] who perpetuates this tyrant. After all when the tide turns we want to know who to tar and feather.’
The group’s belief that its march next month will win the hearts and minds – and the support – of serving members of the Armed Forces would appear misjudged, if an antivaccination protest at the BBC earlier this month is anything to go by. Taking part were two Parachute Regiment veterans – neither linked to V4F – who were reported to the police after paratroopers helped track them down.
Images from the protest at Television Centre showing their distinctive maroon berets caused anger among serving personnel.
V4F began to take shape a few months ago when Belzaac decided that the original name, Patriots GB, sounded too ‘neo-Nazi’.
After a Mail on Sunday reporter tried to contact Belzaac for comment last week, he received a threatening phone call from someone describing himself as the leader’s ‘representative’.
Of the September 8 march, Scorpio Rising tells the group in a message ‘I do like the idea of discipline and keeping formation and not being all leary, spitting and shouting etc. But I do quite fancy the rumble of war drums marching with us. Also a shield wall of umbrellas when required so they can’t see anything… for me it’s also about saying we are here, we are not scared and we stand in defiance… We will not be policed or governed by criminals and will not kneel to a dictatorship.’
Another member, Chazz, replied: ‘But we as soldiers should be thinking about doing more than marches.’ He goes on to suggest ‘storming vax centres’ and ‘going to schools when they start doing it there and doing the same. Actually going into the BBC and taking it over not just standing outside’. Another says: ‘The BBC building needs f ****** burning down.’
The group has chilling echoes of the many amateur militias behind January’s invasion of Congress in the United States, where ‘domestic extremism’ is seen as a long-term threat to peace and stability.
‘As soldiers we should be doing more than march’