Travellers made me plant spiked baby food: farmer

A SHEEP farmer has claimed Travellers forced him to plant a jar of baby food contaminated with shards of metal in a Tesco store and that they threatened to kill him and his family unless he helped them blackmail the supermarket giant.

Nigel Wright (45) allegedly deliberately spiked jars of baby food with fragments of blades as part of a plot to blackmail Tesco for £1.4 million worth of Bitcoin between May 2018 and February this year.

Wright, from Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, sent dozens of letters to the supermarket chain offering to reveal the location of products he claimed to have contaminated in exchange for cryptocurrency, a court heard.

His trial at the Old Bailey previously heard how two mothers, one in Lockerbie and one in Rochdale, were just moments away from feeding their infants shards of metal when they spotted them.

Yesterday in court Wright admitted sending the letters but claimed Travellers had come to his property demanding he give them £500,000.

He said the threats began when he fired a warning shot with his shotgun at a group of men who had come to his property looking for scrap metal.

Wright said the men returned to his farm some days later, pinned him to the ground and threatened him with a knife.

“One said: ‘I want your farm’. I said: ‘I can’t give you my farm’. Then he said: ‘I want the money to buy a farm’,” Wright said.

The defendant said the unknown men had suggested he either rob a bank, start stealing cows, or poison a supermarket to raise the cash.

Wright said one man in particular kept returning to threaten him.

“He came back and said: ‘Where’s my money?’” he said.

“I told him I had contacted Tesco and asked them for money — I gave him a copy of the letter I had written.

“I hadn’t sent it. He said: ‘I’ll kill your wife and your children’. So I had to post that letter.”

When asked why he did not just go to the police, he said: “I’ve been to the police in the past and they’ve failed me.” Wright said he would have had no idea how to contaminate the baby food and that the men threatening him had given him the jar found in Lockerbie and forced him to plant it there.

“If I didn’t get this money, this guy was going to carry out these threats. He was going to hurt my family,” he said.

Wright denies all charges. The trial, which is expected to last two weeks, continues.