Jailed, pair who set car ablaze at officer’s home

A BUSINESSMAN and his personal trainer who set fire to a car outside a policeman’s home have been jailed for a total of 11 years.

As PC David Farr and his family slept, William Handy and Craig Guest torched his wife’s car in a bid to intimidate him.

Judge Lord Woolman said the deliberate blaze was calculated to violate the officer’s home and his family life.

The High Court in Edinburgh heard Handy, 54, recruited former soldier Guest, 32, to carry out the attack because he believed police were waging an ‘unfair campaign of harassment against him’.

But the judge said PC Farr had simply been ‘carrying out his lawful duties’. A victim impact statement by the officer, who was at home with his wife and baby daughter, spoke of how the blaze in the early hours of the morning had left him shaken and scared.

He said it had affected his health and made him feel he could not protect his family.

Lord Woolman jailed Guest for six years after he ignited petrol poured onto the vehicle, which was parked outside the house in the Balumbie area of Dundee.

The judge sentenced Handy to five years’ imprisonment, telling him: ‘You were the architect of this pernicious crime.’

Guest, of Dundee, had earlier admitted wilfully setting the car alight in June 2014, while Handy, of Errol, Perthshire, was convicted after a trial. The court heard how police had been conducting an operation across the Tayside area and Handy had become of interest as an associate of others.

At one stage he was pulled over by police and placed in handcuffs. Handy then used a website to search for officers’ addresses, expressing anger on several occasions about the police.

Guest was acting as a personal fitness trainer to Handy, who passed him PC Farr’s address.

Defence counsel Gary Allan, QC, said that Guest, who has a previous conviction for serious assault, had found himself in debt and that fire-raising would see the money written off.

He wrote in a letter that he was ‘completely ashamed of myself’ and that he was in ‘a desperate place’ at the time.