SHOCK AFTER NAVAL SHAME What shall we do with a drunken sailor... make him a jail guard
A DISGRACED Royal Navy sailor locked up for a degrading drunken prank is back behind bars – as a prison officer.
Christopher Cook was hired by jail bosses despite doing 15 months in a military detention centre for an incident in which a fellow recruit suffered a painful assault.
The case made headlines after Cook, then a leading seaman, slapped his penis in the face of the sleeping victim aboard the frigate
HMS Northumberland – while a crewmate shoved a Heineken lager bottle up the man’s bottom.
Just four years after he was sentenced for the incident by a court martial, Cook, 36, is working at his local prison.
Justice sources stressed he had been “rehabilitated” and that bosses were fully aware of his background before he was hired. He is now patrolling wings at Category C Dartmoor prison in Devon, the forbidding 200-year-old nick originally built for French prisoners of war.
In 2015 a military court was told the victim had been drinking heavily at a petty officers’ mess party while the frigate was docked in Dorset and fell asleep in just his boxer shorts.
Cook was said to have struck the victim five times with his penis and co-defendant Andrew Donaldson handed his iphone to a friend to film the violation with the bottle.
Donaldson, who is now 29, went out on deck for a cigarette and showed others the footage, asking:
“Do you want to see something funny?” Next morning the victim faced ridicule and was in “eight out of 10” pain.
The incident was reported to naval police and Cook faced a charge of disgraceful conduct of an indecent kind. He was sentenced to detention and dismissed from the service with disgrace. Donaldson, who later said he did it “for a laugh”, got five years.
Yesterday, prison sources stressed Cook had received “not a custodial sentence but a military sentence”.
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “All Prison Service staff undergo rigorous checks and will only be employed after a full risk-assessment.”