British police arrest politician’s spouse over tweet

Wife of UK councillor has been indicted after calling on rioters to “set fire” to migrant hotels

The wife of a Conservative councillor in the UK has been arrested on charges of racial hatred, after saying hotels housing asylum seekers should be burned down, British media reported on Tuesday.

Lucy Connolly made the remarks on her X account (formerly Twitter) hours after the fatal stabbing of three schoolgirls at a dance class in the town of Southport on July 29. The suspected killer has been identified as Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Britain to Rwandan parents.

In a now deleted post, the 41-year-old woman, who works as a childminder in Northampton, said: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f**** hotels full of the b***** for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them.”

“I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

Connolly has since apologized, and said she had acted on “false and malicious” information and wrote the post in a moment of “extreme outrage and emotion.”

Northamptonshire Police said she was arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred, and remains in custody.

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Her husband, Tory councillor Raymond Connolly, said his wife made a “stupid, spur-of-the-moment tweet out of frustration and quickly deleted it.”

“She’s a good person and she’s not racist,” he told the BBC, adding that “she’s got Somalian and Bangladeshi kids she looks after and she loves them like they’re her own.”

In another post on X on Tuesday, Ms Connolly said: “I am someone who cares enormously about children and the similarity between those beautiful children who were so brutally attacked, and my own daughter, overwhelmed me with horror, but I should not have expressed that horror in the way that I did.”

Dozens of British towns and cities have been rocked by rioting since the attack last Monday, with demonstrators chanting anti-immigrant and anti-Islam slogans, setting fires, and clashing with groups of counter-protesters. Although initially sparked by a false rumors that the stabbing suspect was Muslim, the demonstrations have since grown into a wider backlash against Islam and mass immigration.