Accountant Hit With GBP1000 Fine For Twitter Bomb Joke

Wed, 12 May 2010

An accountant from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, has been fined £1000 for threatening to blow up an airport on the social network site Twitter .

Paul Chambers was arrested in January after he posted a message on the site saying he would blow his local airport "sky high" if his flight was delayed.

The ‘tweet’ was spotted by an off-duty manager at the regional airport who alerted the head of security. After deciding it was not a credible bomb threat the message was then passed on to the Police.

At the time of his arrest, Mr Chambers said only wrote the message to jokingly vent his frustration over the closure of the Robin Hood airport in Doncaster, which was affected by heavy snowfall.

The 26-year-old appeared at Doncaster Magistrates' Court where he pleaded not guilty to a single charge of sending an offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing message over a public telecommunications network.

However, district judge Jonathan Bennett yesterday ruled that the message was "of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live", and ordered Mr Chambers to pay £1000 in fines and costs.

The incident also cost him his job as a finance supervisor at a car distribution company near Doncaster, and he now has a criminal record to his name.

After the hearing, Chambers wrote on the Twitter site: "I’d like to thank the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) for their level-best efforts in f***ing up the life of an ordinary citizen. I love Britain."

He added that he was currently considering an appeal.
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