On Friday evening, a section of lawyers and rights activists convened a Space meeting on the social media platform X to discuss what they said was an alarming decision by the state to charge suspects of looting and arson with terrorism.

Many doubted that the Director of Public Prosecutions would approve the terrorism charges, whose threshold they said the Constitution had set very high. The lingering debate throughout their engagement, however, was why they thought the state had opted for terrorism and not other offences that are prescribed in the Public Order Act.