Guilty, SNP councillor who sent hate texts to secret lover
A FORMER SNP councillor was yesterday fined £1,000 after sending a string of hate messages to his Muslim lover in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.
Craig Melville, who was a councillor in Dundee and also worked as an aide to a senior Nationalist MSP, sent the derogatory messages to Nadia El-Nakla on the night of the attack on the Bataclan theatre.
In one message, he told Miss El-Nakla that Islam was ‘a horrible disease’. The texts were later discovered by her husband, who searched her mobile phone after uncovering her affair with Melville.
The 37-year-old had denied a charge of behaving in a threatening and abusive manner, aggravated by religious prejudice, towards Miss El-Nakla that was ‘likely to cause a reasonable person fear and alarm’.
But a sheriff yesterday found Melville guilty and fined him £1,000.
Miss El-Nakla, a parliamentary assistant and senior case officer for Health Secretary Shona Robison, told Dundee Sheriff Court she began working at the SNP’s Dundee offices in January 2014.
By that April, she and Melville had started an ‘on-off intimate’ affair’ – despite her being married and him being engaged.
The 34-year-old said she was at home on the night of November 13, 2015, when Islamic extremists murdered 130 people in a string of attacks in the French capital.
In the early hours of the next morning she received a drunken phone call from Melville, who then proceeded to send her a series of text messages.
The court heard one of the texts read: ‘It’s not personal I just f ****** hate your religion and I’ll do all [to] defeat your filth.’
Another text said: ‘And in your favour we live in an uneducated left lift loopy left wing society who is more interested in claiming benefits and being ignorant to the threat of your horrible disease which is a make believe **** in the sky. Horrible murdering Islamic ***** .’
She told the court her now estranged husband, Fariad Umar, took her phone after discovering a text from Melville’s number and downloaded 14,000 pages of information from it, including many deleted texts. Mr Umar, 39, told the trial that he had spotted messages on her mobile phone under the name ‘Karen’ that were clearly not from Miss El-Nakla’s friend of that name.
He said: ‘I compared that number with the number on my phone for Karen and they didn’t match.
‘I called it and a male voice answered. I Googled it and it came up with Craig Melville’s name.’
Mr Umar confronted Miss ElNakla who denied an affair – prompting the IT specialist to use data recovery software to retrieve the text messages.
He put them on a disc and gave it to police investigating threats alleged to have been made against Miss El-Nakla by Melville, a matter that never came to court.
Mr Umar said: ‘Nadia told me there were some of these messages so I searched for them.’
The messages handed to police were shown in court yesterday, with sexual references mixed among mundane conversation and derogatory religious remarks.
Mr Umar said: ‘Initially I was only thinking about the affair – but later I thought that someone in his elected position shouldn’t have these views so I sent them to MSPs and his bosses.’
Fiscal depute Joanne Smith asked him: ‘If it was suggested to you that you somehow manufactured or fabricated these messages what would you say to that?’ He replied: ‘I’d say that’s a lie.’ Melville was suspended by the SNP and quit as a Dundee councillor when the allegations came to light in January 2016.
Solicitor Douglas McConnell, defending, urged the sheriff to acquit his client, saying: ‘The Crown case does not meet the standard.’
He added: ‘This case has effectively blown everything in his life out of the water. He grew up around politics and was enjoying a career in politics. That is gone.
‘He has moved from Dundee and is now a personal trainer.’
But Sheriff Scott Pattison found Melville guilty, and ordered him to pay off the £1,000 fine at £100 a month. Melville declined to comment as he left court.
‘Career in politics is gone’