Police officer charged over Hannah Thomas arrest at anti-Israel protest

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A NSW Police officer has been charged with assault over the arrest of former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas at an anti-Israel protest in June.

Police confirmed on Tuesday that a 33-year-old senior constable attached to a specialist command in south-west Sydney had been issued a court attendance notice for assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

Hannah Thomas, a former Greens candidate, suffered a serious injury to her eye after police broke up a protest in Sydney’s south-west.

The officer, whose employment status is now under review, is due to appear at Bankstown Local Court next month.

The arrest comes after prosecutors dropped charges against Thomas and four of her co-accused earlier this month.

The actions of police involved in the arrests have been the subject of considerable criticism because of questions over which laws officers relied on to break up the demonstration. On Friday, Thomas and the four co-accused — Shane Reside, Zackary Schofield and Holly Zhang — were awarded almost $40,000 in costs.

Both the NSW Police and the Office of the Director for Public Prosecutions did not dispute that the four protesters had grounds to be awarded costs, with Magistrate George Breton finding they had conceded there was a “flaw in the prosecution case which revolved around the asserted unlawfulness of the protest”.

Thomas suffered a serious eye injury when officers broke up the protest, held outside SEC Plating, a business in Belmore, which the group says supplies plating services for F-35 jets used by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

She has undergone multiple surgeries since, and was warned by doctors that she may never regain vision in her right eye.

Police initially maintained there was no wrongdoing by officers, and court documents prepared by police after Thomas’ arrest blamed “interference” from other protesters for her injury.

On June 30, Assistant Commissioner Brett McFadden told the ABC that police were not investigating the potential for excessive use of force by officers.

McFadden said he had conducted a “preliminary review” of the body-worn video footage along with other senior officers.

There was “no information at this stage before me that indicates any misconduct on behalf of any of my officers,” he said at the time.

But the arrest was subsequently referred to the NSW Police internal investigations unit after a briefing of senior officers raised “questions of excessive force”.