Blogging will be somewhat curtailed over the next couple of weeks because family will be dropping by, an event that we all treasure but that happens all too often.
In any event, it's hard to know what to make of this, since it (and all of the other reports I've tracked down on LexisNexis) ignores whether the two individuals arrested were Animal Rights activists or not:
A man and a woman have been arrested on suspicion of desecrating an 82-year-old woman's grave and removing her remains, police said.
A 32-year-old man and a 30-year-old woman were detained at a house in Gloucester today by a team of 25 Staffordshire Police officers who travelled to the city to execute the warrant.
Search teams were said to be sweeping the house while the pair, who were arrested at 6am, were being transported to Staffordshire for questioning.
The body of Gladys Hammond was taken from her grave in the grounds of St Peter's Church in Yoxall, Staffordshire, under cover of darkness in October last year.
Mrs Hammond's son-in-law co-owns a guinea pig breeding farm in nearby Newchurch which has been targeted by animal rights campaigners.
This morning's arrests follow a fresh appeal for information on BBC1's Crimewatch UK programme last night.
Staffordshire Police said this had prompted a small number of calls to the studio but stressed the arrests were a "separate development".
Two men and a woman arrested in connection with the offence last year remain on police bail.
A force spokesman confirmed that none of Mrs Hammond's remains had been recovered.
Though none of the articles in this present cluster specifically ties the arrested couple to Animal Rights/Animal Liberationists, there is reason to believe that an AR/AL crew are, indeed, the perps: Bite Back!, the extremist Animal Liberation site includes the desecration in its list of "direct actions" (link). And, of course, the grave was that of the mother-in-law of AR/AL target David Hall. (For those unfamiliar with Mr. Hall's trials and tribulations and those of the entire village that is being terrorized, you might start here and follow the links.)
Still, one can't be totally sure that the grave desecration occurred under the AR banner: the AR/AL terrorists have a vested interest in cultivating their terrorist image, which is, after all, a powerful weapon of intimidation in and of itself. So our kinder, gentler extremists are probably not above enhancing their image by taking credit for things done by others for reasons entirely unrelated to Animal Rights.
We await developments . . .
Brian