Animal rights activists convicted over laboratory hate campaign

FOUR animal rights activists face up to 14 years in jail after being found guilty yesterday of blackmailing companies who supplied Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Gerrah Selby, 20, Daniel Wadham, 21, Gavin Medd-Hall, 45, Heather Nicholson, 41, and Trevor Holmes, 51, were accused of orchestrating a campaign which ran between 2001 and 2007.

All five denied conspiracy to blackmail but Selby, Wadham, Medd-Hall and Nicholson were found guilty at Winchester Crown Court. Holmes was cleared of the charge.

One of the jurors refused to be seen in court while the verdict was announced, after 33 hours and 48 minutes of deliberation.

Selby, Wadham and Medd-Hall were released on conditional bail, while Nicholson was remanded in custody until sentencing on 19 January.

The maximum sentence for the offence is 14 years in prison.

Three other people – Gregg Avery, Natasha Avery and Daniel Amos – previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to blackmail.

The group, called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac), used threats such as claiming that managers of the companies were paedophiles, hoax bomb parcels, criminal damage and threatening telephone calls to force them to cut links with the animal testing company.

The aim was to target suppliers or any company with a secondary link with Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), based in Cambridge.

One of the features of intimidation included sending used sanitary towels in the post, saying they were contaminated with the Aids virus, and personal campaigns against the management of companies including daubing roads outside their homes with words like "Puppy Killer".

Detective Chief Inspector Andy Robbins, senior investigating officer of Kent Police, said outside court: "Today's verdict reflects the continuing commitment of law enforcement and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS] to bring to justice those who seek to repress reasonable discussion and who commit serious offences in the name of animal rights."

He paid tribute to the victims of the "systematic and relentless intimidation" which lasted for six years until arrests were made on 1 May, 2007.

The defendants were linked to criminal activity in Europe and America, targeting companies there.

The CPS reviewing lawyer, Alastair Nisbet, said outside the court: "This has been a long and very detailed investigation which was made all the more difficult by the fact that the defendants concealed their criminal activities behind a cloak of lawful protest by their use of encryption and file-wiping software on their computers and by the routine destruction of any documents that they thought might incriminate them."

HLS defended its right to use animal testing as a "small but essential" part of researching and developing new medicines.

An HLS spokesman said: "Freedom of expression and lawful protest are important rights in our democratic society but so too is the right to conduct vital biomedical research, or to support organisations that perform such research, without being harassed and threatened."

The latest prosecution provides another example of the lengths some animal rights extremists are prepared to go to.

Activists opposed to a farm in Yoxall, Staffordshire, where guinea pigs were bred for research, dug up the grave of Gladys Hammond, the mother-in-law of one of the owners, in October 2004 as part of a hate campaign which led to the farm's closure.


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INSTEAD of targeting the animal testing company directly, leaders of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) decided to target its suppliers to make it impossible for HLS to operate.

Their tactics ranged from personal attacks by incorrectly branding company directors paedophiles, through to posting used sanitary towels and hoax bomb parcels.

One PA was targeted and had her house and car daubed with paint saying ALF (Animal Liberation Front) and "puppy killer". A scientist who worked for GlaxoSmithKline was targeted in a similar way, and an employee of Novartis had letters sent to his neighbours falsely saying he was a serial sex offender who went abroad to abuse children.

The managing director of a chemicals company said his family's life was turned into a "living hell" for six months when he was targeted by SHAC. A hoax bomb was sent to his home.