'Captain Gatso' emerges as voice behind motorist lib

BRITAIN:The unexplained series of exploding letter bombs in England has raised the media profile of a self-styled Captain Gatso.

Captain Gatso is the would be defender of a certain breed of British car driver - the libertarian motorist who seems to believe that the UK's traffic enforcement is a tyrannical assault on the Englishman's personal freedoms as derived from Magna Carta.

Like the IRA's P O'Neill, Gatso doesn't exist as such; rather, he is the mouthpiece of an organisation known as Mad - Motorists Against Detection - whose obsessions are displayed in detail on their website, speedcam.co.uk.

In the days since the spate of letter bombs, Captain Gatso, or rather a voice answering to that name, has popped up on several UK TV and radio stations seeking to explain the motivation behind the terror campaign.

Three of this week's seven attacks have been against entities associated with motor law enforcement: Capita, the London-based company that enforces the city's congestion charges ; Vantis, a company that supplies police with digital cameras; and the DVLA, the UK's Swansea-based driver and vehicle licencing agency.

Captain Gatso says he condemns the attacks and is not associated with them. "This is obviously some loner who got a wodge of tickets that put him over the edge," he told the BBC.

According to Mad's website, "Capt Gatso is a family man from north London. He's in his 40s, a professional, he owns a BMW M3 and is a keen motorcyclist." As Captain Gatso would have it: "Most of the organising group [ of Mad] are just ordinary blokes with families who are sick of us heading towards a police state."

The symbol of that police state is, above all others, the speed camera. Gatsometer - or "Gatso" - is a leading brand of Dutch-made speed camera widely used up and down Britain's roads. Mad's case against them is, essentially, that they are revenue-generating devices for police forces rather than life-savers and, for this reason, Mad sometimes refers to them as "scameras".

While Captain Gatso seeks to disassociate himself from violence, Mad's website celebrates blowing up speed cameras, smashing them to the ground, spray painting their lenses and, in a strange adaptation of "necklacing", putting burning car tyres around the tops of camera poles to melt the cameras' innards.

Mad says it has "taken out" more than 1,000 cameras since 2000. The group claims a membership of about 200 people throughout the UK.