LONDON: A British court has held four animal rights activists guilty of blackmailing suppliers of Huntingdon Life Sciences, a laboratory involved in animal testing of pharmaceuticals, in a "relentless" campaign that included hoax parcel bombs and criminal damage.
Gerrah Selby, 20,Daniel Wadham, 21,Gavin Medd-Hall, 45,and Heather Nicholson, 41,were convicted for the six-year campaign, which was designed to shut down the animal research laboratory in Cambridge. Sentencing will take place on January 19 at the Winchester Crown Court.
The activists, who pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to blackmail, were convicted of trying to force the four supplier companies to cut links with the laboratory.
A jury took more than 33 hours to convict them while a fifth member of the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac), Trevor Holmes, 51,was cleared of the same charge.
Three others - Gregg Avery, Natasha Avery, and Daniel Amos - have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to blackmail.
"This conspiracy to blackmail involved the systematic and relentless intimidation of individuals and their companies whom Shac suspected of supplying Huntingdon Life Sciences," one of the investigating detectives, chief inspector Andy Robbins, said outside the court.
Besides making threatening phone calls, the campaign included falsely claiming that managers of some of the companies were paedophiles and sending used sanitary towels in the post, saying they were contaminated with Aids.
A manager of a distribution firm linked to HLS said his home had been targeted. Paint-stripper was poured over his car and its tyres were punctured.
Letters were allegedly sent to residents in the managers village falsely stating that he was a convicted sex offender.
A worker at another supplier firm had her house and car daubed with paint saying "ALF" (Animal Liberation Front) and "puppy killer".
The prosecutors claimed that the smear campaign was organised with "military precision" against HLS, which legally uses animals in the testing of pharmaceutical products.
Police bugged the headquarters for the campaign, run out of Little Moorcote near Hook in Hampshire, uncovering links with other activists in the US and Europe.
The campaign was brought to a halt by a massive police raid involving 700 officers targeting addresses across Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium in May last year.
