Greenpeace has said its activists were arrested by police after ending a protest where they suspended themselves from the Forth Road Bridge to block a tanker carrying fracked gas. The bridge, outside Edinburgh, was closed on Friday afternoon as ten activists abseiled down ropes, hanging about 25 metres above the water at high tide.
Police Scotland was alerted to the protest shortly after 1pm on Friday. The demonstration prevented the Ineos tanker from delivering gas to the Grangemouth petrochemical plant for a full 24 hours, as the vessel could only travel during high tides. The activists began descending early on Saturday morning.
All ten descended safely and were voluntarily transported to Port Edgar in South Queensferry, where they were arrested on suspicion of culpable and reckless conduct. Greenpeace insisted the protest was safe and caused minimal disruption, noting weeks of training and that the bridge carries low volumes of traffic.
Amy Cameron, programme director at Greenpeace UK, said: 'We’ve achieved what we set out to. By blocking Ineos, we’ve drawn global attention to the company’s bottomless appetite for plastic production, false solutions and profit for its billionaire boss Jim Ratcliffe.' She called for a strong global plastics treaty with legally-binding caps on production.
