Guilty, blackmailer who spiked Tesco baby food
Farmer laced jars with metal shards in bid to extort £1.5m
A blAckmAiler who demanded £1.5million from Tesco after lacing baby food with razor-sharp shards of metal is facing a lengthy jail term.
A Scots mother found the fragments when she was feeding her infant son.
Sheep farmer Nigel Wright, 45, began his two-year campaign in 2018.
The married father of two threatened to inject tins of fruit with cyanide and salmonella unless the supermarket giant handed over the sum in cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Wright signed off his emails and letters ‘Guy brush & the Dairy Pirates + Tinkerbell the naughty fairy’, and claimed that he represented dairy farmers who had been underpaid by Tesco.
He triggered two nationwide recalls on cow & Gate and Heinz baby food, prompting the chain to clear 140,000 products.
A detective posed as a Tesco employee named Sam Scott and handed over £100,000 worth of bitcoin to trap the blackmailer.
Wright was caught on ccTV buying wine and flowers for his wife after placing a contaminated jar on the shelves of a branch in lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, on November 29 last year.
He also placed two jars of contaminated food in a shop in rochdale, lancashire.
morven Smith ‘felt sick’ when she found shards of metal in a jar of Heinz sweet and sour chicken that she was feeding to her ten-month-old son.
mrs Smith, from lockerbie, had already given some of the food to her baby when she spotted the metal in the bowl in December of last year. She said: ‘i gave my son a couple of spoonfuls and noticed something shiny – i pulled it out with my fingers at that point.
‘it was horrendous. i felt sick i was so shocked.’
Her husband found a second piece of metal in the jar.
A second mother, Harpreet kaur Singh, found ‘shredded chippings of metal’ in jars of Heinz Sunday chicken dinner and cheese and tomato pasta stars. She wept as she told the court she had been moments away from feeding them to her nine-month-old daughter.
Prosecutor Julian christopher, Qc, said the blackmailer took ‘delight’ in his plan. He believed he could ‘get rich’ without leaving any trace of his identity by using the cryptocurrency and downloading the browser Tor, allowing for anonymous communication. but his emails and letters were forwarded to police and he was soon interacting with an undercover officer.
A draft of an email to Tesco was found on one of Wright’s
‘Horrendous. I felt sick’
devices. The threat read: ‘Imagine a baby’s mouth cut open blood pouring out and the inside of their belly cut and bleeding.’
Excerpts of emails sent by Wright said: ‘Dear Sam, we have been polite and courteous as we recognise you’re just an employee who goes home at the end of the day. We say you pay us then we will email you.
‘It appears we both failed to do what we said we would.
‘If you set up a bank account you can purchase bitcoin and transfer them into our account. As a goodwill gesture we will tell you you have eight jars of Cow & Gate baby food left on your supermarket shelves on Tuesday 21 and Wednesday 22 [of January] there were only six jars left, so only six potential dead babies.’
Wright admitted sending emails and letters to Tesco demanding the money but said travellers had threatened to kill his children and rape his wife unless he paid them £500,000.
He said that he had been given the jars by one of his alleged handlers, who followed him to the Lockerbie store.
But he admitted his threats to the company had been inspired by his own research, watching documentaries and searching for ideas on Google.
An Old Bailey jury yesterday convicted Wright, of Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, of two counts of contaminating goods and four counts of blackmail.
One of the blackmail charges related to threats he sent to a driver following a road rage altercation in 2018.
He posted a photograph of motorist John Winter’s face with bullet holes across it.
The maximum term for blackmail is 14 years while the maximum for contaminating goods is ten years.
Wright was remanded into custody ahead of sentencing, on a date to be fixed.