Husband ‘found councillor’s racist texts’

A HUSBAND found racist texts allegedly sent to his wife by an SNP councillor after discovering the pair were having an affair, a court heard yesterday.

Craig Melville – who resigned his post as a Dundee city councillor and aide to Nationalist MP Stewart Hosie after the claims – is alleged to have sent texts to Nadia El-Nakla on the two days following the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

Miss El-Nakla, a caseworker for Health Secretary Shona Robison, told a trial at Dundee Sheriff Court she began working at the party’s Dundee offices in January 2014.

By April of that year she and Melville started an ‘on-off, intimate’ affair, despite her being married and he being engaged.

Miss El-Nakla told the court her now estranged husband, Fariad Umar, had taken her phone from her after discovering a text from Melville’s number.

She said he downloaded 14,000 pages of information from her phone, including many deleted texts. Mr Umar, 39, told the trial he had spotted messages on her iPhone under the name ‘Karen’.

He later confronted Miss El-Nakla, who initially denied an affair, prompting the IT specialist to use recovery software to retrieve the text messages.

He later placed them on a disc that was subsequently passed to police investigating threats alleged to have been made against Miss El-Nakla by Melville, a matter that was never brought to court.

The messages handed to police by Mr Umar and shown in court included sexual messages and racist content.

Melville, 37, of Dundee, denies a charge which is alleged to have been aggravated by religious prejudice. He denies behaving in a threatening and abusive manner towards Nadia El-Nakla in November 2015.

Prosecutors say he behaved in a way ‘likely to cause fear and alarm’ by sending messages that ‘contained threatening, abusive remarks regarding Muslims’.

The trial before Sheriff Scott Pattison continues.