A St Andrews research facility has been repeatedly targeted by a suspected anarchist group over the last few days in what the perpetrators have described as “an act of industrial sabotage.”
Police are probing overnight vandalism incidents at Fluid Gravity Engineering on Market Street after staff arrived on Monday and Tuesday mornings to find the front door locks glued shut.
A group calling themselves the Sneak Attack Tigers have admitted responsibility for the attacks in an email sent to The Courier and posted online, and have threatened to carry out further acts of vandalism on similar targets elsewhere.
It is not known how many people were involved, but the group claimed to have used the cover of the Lammas Market to carry out their vandalism which is understood to have cost the company hundreds of pounds to rectify undetected.
Describing Fluid Gravity Engineering as a “weapons research” company in the email, the Sneak Attack Tigers boasted of their efforts.
“In the dead of the night, whilst the inept pigs of Fife Constabulary slept, we snuck through the winding maze of corridors that the fairground presented to liberally apply a quality adhesive product to the numerous shiny locks of the FGE building in St Andrews,” it said.
“Fluid Gravity Engineering are contracted by the military-industrial complex, in order to help design better and more efficient ‘defence technology’ (or tools of murder as they are known to you and I) to be used in the wars and occupations that rage all over the Earth, thereby not only helping to kill and maim countless innocent men, women and children, but also making a tidy little profit while they’re at it.
“Capitalism’s perverse stench knows no boundaries, neither moral nor physical, and as a result we find ourselves on a daily basis confronted with its many tendrils in St Andrews it adopts the form of FGE, many here not even being aware of the existence of this blight, let alone its presence in the very heart of St Andrews.
“Elsewhere, too, the cancer spreads in nearby Glenrothes the arms giant Raytheon thrives, and across the water at Leuchars, the soon-to-be ex-RAF base prepares to greet a new wave of starry-eyed recruits, ready to be sent to their deaths and those of their hapless victims.”‘Expect resistance we are everywhere'”This will not go on. Every rifle comes from a factory and every bullet has its maker.
“Where the capitalist-military machine raises its head, we will be there to greet it with the hammer of resistance (and the super-glue of solidarity).”
The group criticised St Andrews University for being a “recruiting ground for institutions which fill the pockets of the rich and the powerful”.
They said, “From weapons of financial carnage invented by greedy bankers, to weapons of mass destruction developed by greedy scientists the call of money has always rung through the halls of St Andrews.
“This call continues to ring true as ever and Fluid Gravity Engineering continues to heed it.”
The email ends, “Expect resistance we are everywhere!”
Fluid Gravity Engineering, which also has a base in the south of England, is an independent scientific and engineering research company and has extensive experience in aerospace and defence technology.
It maintains strong links with UK universities including St Andrews, and UK, US and European government research agencies.
No-one at the company was willing to comment on what had happened, while St Andrews University also declined to comment.
A police spokesperson confirmed that officers are investigating, saying, “We received a report of vandalism at premises in Market Street and inquiries are at an early stage.”
Anyone with information is asked to call the police on 0845 600 5702.