A 56-year-old man has been found guilty of posting threatening messages about The Queen on Twitter. He has now been fined £500 for the offence. The 56-year-old man was named as Alastair Dow from Aberdeen, Scotland. Alastair Dow’s home in Aberdeen was raided by police after intelligence officers saw the posts made during the Commonwealth Games in 2014.
Shortly after these tweets were published, they were caught by the police. The police in Aberdeen believed that the threat was so serious that they visited the man’s home on 26 July 2014. He went on trial at Aberdeen Sheriff Court and claimed there was no intended threat behind the posts; still, he was found guilty in January 2017.
One tweet he posted about The Queen is said to have read: “It’s not a little rest I need but to see your Queen’s brains blown out and her body splattered over the ground.” In another tweet, Alastair Dow described himself as “a man at war for my freedom.” He also posted another threatening tweet about his army, and that his army wanted “to put a bullet in the monarch’s head.”
In court, Alastair Dow denied all of the allegations and said the wording of his messages had been “blown out of proportion.” He said, although he composed the posts, they should not have been taken literally, but seen as “rhetoric.”
Before the court, Alastair Dow said: “In my opinion, there was no reason to escalate my tweets to a court case. There are various sentencing options listed in the report – I would co-operate with anything to avoid a jail sentence.”
Sheriff McLaughlin told Dow: “I’m not going to impose jail. I think it would be disproportionate. Since this happened in 2014, there’s been nothing else.”
Fining him £500, the sheriff said: “We will always disagree about the seriousness – but I consider it to be a serious breach of the peace.”
What a revolting cretin.