Husband finds racist texts on wife’s phone after discovering affair

A shocked husband found a trove of racist texts allegedly sent by an SNP councillor to his wife – an aide to health secretary Shona Robison – after he discovered the pair were having a secret affair, a court heard yesterday.

Craig Melville – who had to resign his post as a Dundee city councillor and aide to SNP MP Stewart Hosie over the allegations – is alleged to have sent a series of texts to Nadia El Nakla on the two days following the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks.

Ms El Nakla, a caseworker for SNP MSP Shona Robison, told a trial at Dundee Sheriff Court how she had started 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 at that point, and marrying his fiancée later that year. She told how she was at home on the night of the Paris attacks on Friday 13 November.

In the early hours of the Saturday, she said she received a drunken phone call from Melville. She said he then sent her a series of texts.

One text allegedly read: “It’s not personal I just f*****g hate your religion and I’ll do all in I’m life do defeat your filth.”

Ms 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 and had downloaded 14,000 pages of information from her phone, including many deleted texts.

Mr Umar, 39, told the trial yesterday how he had spotted messages on her iphone under the name “Karen” that were clearly not from Ms 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 later confronted Ms El Nakla, who initially denied having an affair – prompting the IT specialist to use data recovery software to retrieve the text messages.

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

The messages handed to police by Mr Umar were shown in court yesterday with sexual messages mixed among mundane conversation and the racist content.

Melville, 37, of Marlee Road, Dundee, denies a charge under the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act, which is alleged to have been aggravated by religious prejudice.

The trial continues.