Brazilian national Julian Valente Pereira, 32, staged a protest at the secret services base at Thames House, in central London, a day after he had been told he would be deported
Chilling footage shows how a failed asylum seeker sparked a terror alert with a fake stick of dynamite left outside the headquarters of MI5 after being told he would be deported.
Brazilian national Julian Valente Pereira, 32, staged a protest at the secret services base at Thames House, in central London. He has now been remanded in custody to be sentenced at the Old Bailey after a magistrate ruled the offence too serious for his court.
CCTV footage shows Pereira stuffing paperwork about his immigration case through the doors of the building, then retrieving the “dynamite” from his bag.
He initially threw the object on the pavement, allowing the CCTV operator to zoom in to reveal what appeared to be a fuse hanging out of the top of the brown cylinder.
Pereira is then seen moving the object, propping it up against the MI5 HQ doors, with a green cigarette lighter positioned nearby. At Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday, Pereira had been due to be sentenced by Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring.
But the judge said he had concluded the case was too serious to be dealt with in the magistrates court, where his powers are limited to 12-month jail terms.
He noted that resources had to be diverted away from policing London’s New Year’s Day parade after Pereira’s actions triggered a terrorism alert, and Pereira had deliberately chosen MI5 as his target.
“His culpability is diminished by his mental health, but it’s the diversion of resources and the building chosen that are significant,” he said. “If I was sitting in the Crown Court, I would be looking at a sentence of about 18 months, which might be suspended, and I don’t see how I can sentence today.”
Pereira was remanded back into custody, to be sentenced at the Old Bailey on a date to be set. Pereira’s actions, on January 1, led to a counter-terrorism bomb expert being called in to assess the item left at the door to MI5.
It was then discovered that Pereira had used rolled-up A4 paper, brown masking tape, and string to create the fake explosive device. A trial in February heard Pereira was facing deportation from the UK at the time, after his final appeal for asylum had been dismissed.
Prosecutor Shannon Revel said Pereira had admitted he wanted “maximum attention” on his complaints against the Home Office, after a long-running failed bid for permission to stay in Britain.
“No-one was going to pay attention to this act if they thought it was masking tape and paper,” she said. “The attention he desperately wanted on January 1 is only achieved by the fact that someone believed that object could explode.”
Pereira came to the UK with permission to work in July 2018 and has remained in the country illegally since February 2019. “The defendant attended Thames House in Millbank, knowing it to be the headquarters of the security services MI5,”said Ms Revel.
“He tried to open the doors of the building without success. He started to push pieces of paper between the closed doors that were locked.
“He took an item fashioned from paper, string and masking tape out of his jacket pocket. The object was designed to look like a stick of dynamite.”
Giving evidence, Pereira said he left the object at the front of MI5 because he wanted to “catch the attention” of the security services.
“I swear it wasn’t my intention to cause any disruption on Vauxhall Bridge,” he said. He told the court he had also visited Buckingham Palace to throw a bag containing a copy of the immigration ruling, and a knife stabbed through his ID, inside the perimeter gates. In messages read out during the trial, Pereira had told a friend of his plan.
“I’m going to Buckingham Palace with a knife and one pen drive,” he wrote, adding: “All the information is inside the pen drive.”
When he was told to “stop being an idiot”, Pereira wrote: “I’m going to try and get attention. “I’m going to throw the bag into Buckingham Palace.”
In a note on his phone from August 2025, Pereira wrote about “MI5 terrorising people inside hotels”, and added: “I need to see the King.”
He also said he planned to “give information” to the Archbishop of Canterbury as a precaution.
When giving evidence, Pereira said the device he left outside MI5 would not have been mistaken for an explosive, but added: “The news inside was dynamite.”
However, the judge found him guilty of carrying out a bomb hoax, after concluding that Pereira intended for those watching his actions to believe the explosive was real. Pereira was arrested in his room at an asylum hotel in Uxbridge, west London, and told officers about his “long and tireless battle with the Home Office to try to attain asylum”, said the prosecutor.
The court heard he handed himself in to police as an overstayer in October 2020, but later sought asylum after being told to leave the UK. He was placed in asylum seeker accommodation in June 2021, asylum was refused in 2023, and his appeal against that decision was rejected by a judge on December 31 2025.
The court heard that Pereira’s paid-for accommodation was withdrawn on January 9.
