A FORMER British soldier and self-styled leader of the Scottish National Liberation Army was jailed for two years by the Special Criminal Court in Dublin yesterday for sending threatening messages by fax to Scottish media outlets.
Adam Busby (48), a separated father of two, and native of Glasgow, with an address at Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin, pleaded guilty to sending "a message of a menacing character" to the Press Association and the Daily Record in Glasgow on January 5th, 1995.
Mr Paul McDermott, prosecuting, said the state was not proceeding with other charges against Busby of having improvised incendiary devices addressed to the British Labour leader, Mr Tony Blair, to Labour Party headquarters in London and to the shadow Scottish Secretary, Mr George Robertson, between January 1st and March 10th, 1995.
The court ordered that the two-year sentence should date from May 22nd, 1996, when Busby was taken into custody.
Det Insp Peter Maguire of the Special Detective Unit said Busby had sent a fax to five media outlets in Scotland from a business services centre in Dorset Street Dublin, on January 5th, 1995. The fax purported to be the "Headquarter's communique of the Scottish National Liberation Army" for 1995.
He said the SNLA was a paramilitary organisation seeking independence for Scotland but it was not a proscribed organisation in either Ireland or Britain.
The fax used the codeword "Spear" and referred to Operation Flame and Operation Hammer. It contained a "hit list" of targets in Scotland including Clydebank MP Mr Anthony Worthington and three regional councillors.
Following publication of the communique by Scottish newspapers, a special unit of Strathclyde police was set up and Scottish police requested the assistance of the Special Detective Unit in Dublin.
Busby had been picked out from an identity parade as the man who had sent the faxes.
Det Insp Maguire said that Busby had served for a time in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment of the British army. He had 15 previous convictions in Scotland for which he had received a number of prison terms but only one in Ireland in 1988 for which he received a one-month suspended sentence.
Busby had come to the Republic in 1983 and had escaped extradition in 1984 to Britain where he was wanted for causing criminal damage to a British army truck in Northumbria after the High Court ruled that the alleged offence was political.
Mr Justice Barr, presiding, said the court regarded the offences as "serious in nature".