Teen bomb hoax caller given 10 weeks’ youth detention

The youth, who is now 18 but was 17 at the time of the incident and cannot be named for legal reasons, was given 10 weeks’* youth detention when he appeared in the Juvenile Court.

He had admitted at an earlier sitting misuse of the telecommunications network to send a false message, but provided no explanation as to why he did it.

Prosecuting officer Jenny McVeigh said that a woman on the reception desk at Beau Sejour took the phone call at about 12.20pm on 4 July. She was unable to see the number of the caller, and heard a woman’s voice asking ‘can you hear me?’.

The staff member replied, but got no response. The message was repeated exactly as before but because she was not getting any other response, the staff member ended the call.

Almost immediately she received another call. The voice was the same and it said ‘a bomb will go off at Beau Sejour at one o’clock’.

This was repeated and the staff member came to the conclusion that it was a recording. She contacted the duty manager and the police were called.

The centre was evacuated, which included swimmers with disabilities having to come out of the pool and sit outside.

A threat assessment was made and after 1pm passed without incident, the situation was declared a hoax and the centre was reopened.

Police investigators traced the call to a mobile phone and the woman who owned the contract was arrested. However, it emerged that this was the youth’s mother, who had taken out the contract for her son. He was arrested soon after.

At interview, he said that he was on anti-depressants and had suffered from interrupted sleep patterns.

He had seen a story on Facebook about a bomb hoax at a school in the USA which had led to it being evacuated.

He went onto Google Translate and entered text to the effect that there was a bomb at the centre, using the site’s text-to-speech feature to play it back.

Ensuring his mobile number was blocked, he called Beau Sejour and played the message over the phone.

After hanging up he realised what he had done and panicked, calling the centre back to cancel a booking he had made for later in the day in the hope that staff would be too busy dealing with this to pay attention to the hoax.

Judge Graeme McKerrell said that, according to the probation report, as well as those with disabilities and other users being evacuated, so was the centre’s caterers, who were meant to be preparing food for a funeral wake.

In mitigation, Advocate Liam Roffey submitted several letters of reference to the court, including a letter the youth himself had written to staff at the centre, apologising for his actions, and from colleagues at his former place of work.

He had immediately regretted what he had done, said Advocate Roffey, who also emphasised the fact that the teenager had never been in trouble with the police before.

While appreciating the gravity of the crime, he asked the court to consider imposing a community service order at the upper end of the scale.

Passing sentence, Judge McKerrell said that an aggravating factor against the youth was that he had clearly thought about what he was doing, going so far as to mask his phone number.

‘I give you credit for the fact that you are a young person of previous good character, which has now been ruined in spectacular fashion,’ he said, also crediting him for his early guilty plea and for co-operating with the police.

But he said he had no alternative but to impose an immediate period of youth detention.

*This story has been amended. The sentence was 10 weeks, not 10 months as originally reported. The Guernsey Press apologises for the error.