The daily newspaper journalist who was threatened with arrest by police while covering a protest last week has told his story, accusing officers of “deeply inapprpriate behaviour.”

As previously reported, Xander Elliards of Scottish daily The National was threatened while reporting on a pro-Palestinian protest at the Thales site in Glasgow.

Both the National Union of Journalists and Scottish Greens MSP have subsequently demanded answers from Police Scotland over their handling of the incident.

And Andrew Tickell, senior lecturer in law at Glasgow Caledonian University, has also weighed into the debate, saying the police had “no business” asking Xander to move on.

Now Xander has written a first-person piece about his experiences, saying the police had done themselves “no favours” by the way they approached the protest.

He blamed the subsequent clashes between police and demonstrators on the “heavy-handed” behaviour of the police, as typefied by the officer who “manhandled” him.

Wrote Xander: “Earlier this week I inadvertently broke one of the golden rules of journalism: never become the story.

“Unfortunately, it was not for a reason I would have chosen.  It was because of the deeply inappropriate behaviour of a police officer in a position of authority.

“Studying for journalism qualifications, you learn about when and where you can legally film, people’s right of privacy, and how that interconnects with others’ rights to freedom of expression. You also learn the basics of what the police can and can’t ask you to do.

“But you don’t need any special training to know that a policeman aggressively grabbing you from behind and saying “let’s get a selfie big man” is not appropriate behaviour.

“The officer had done himself no favours by making two things clear before doing that: One, he stated we were on a public street; and two, he already knew I was a journalist.

“The video of the incident (below) has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and led an MSP to write to the Chief Constable. And it never had to happen.”

🗣️’Let’s have a selfie, big man. Are you still not going to take a direction from a constable in uniform?’

NEW: A journalist at The National was threatened with arrest by a police officer while attempting to cover a major protest outside a Glasgow arms factory

Full video 👇 pic.twitter.com/0ldFLmORit

— The National (@ScotNational) May 15, 2024

Xander continued: “I had been standing with my bike around 100 metres from the site of a protest targeting the Thales arms company’s site in Govan, which I had gone to report on for this paper.

“I’d also reported on a very similar protest at the BAE Systems site essentially next door just two weeks before, and that had been peaceful and uneventful. It looked at 9.30am as if the Thales protest was set to go the same way. So, I thought I’d take one last look around before heading into the office.

“However, doing something innocuous on my phone up the road from the Thales site (I think I’d been checking Google maps for the best route to leave by), I attracted the attention of an officer.

“When I saw him approaching me, at speed and from a distance, my first thought was that there were some protesters behind me causing a ruckus. But there was no one else around.

“The irony of it all is, I was genuinely leaving. If the officer had done nothing, I would have been gone in two minutes. Instead, his aggression suggested to me that something was up, so I stuck around.

“Sure enough, 35 minutes later the police moved in on protesters and clashes erupted. The heavy-handed and occasionally violent interactions that followed over the next roughly two hours seemed to me to flow from the behaviour of the police.

“This behaviour was typified by the officer who manhandled me – while the protest was still entirely peaceful.

“Now, as a result of their own actions, the narrative from the event is not the one the police would have liked to project.

“Instead of hard-working officers getting credit for doing their duty well and keeping the peace – as had happened just two weeks earlier at the BAE Systems protest – we have questions being asked of the force.

“Police Scotland will now have to answer these questions and, in my eyes, it is clear who is to blame.”

A Police Scotland spokesperson previously said: “During the protest an officer engaged with a journalist and asked him to move away from an area where officers were taking part in an operational briefing.

“Officers provided advice and guidance and no further action was taken.”