Man jailed for police station bomb hoax
A man who called 999 claiming that he had planted a bomb at a police station in Sussex has been jailed for six months.
Peter Osbourne, unemployed and of no fixed address, made the call at 7.32am on Friday June 18 – the morning after the Manchester Arena bombing inquest published its first report.
The two-minute phone call led to the deployment of officers from divisional response and operations departments to protect the public, with CCTV operators and officers from the Force Intelligence Unit involved in both tracing the suspect and establishing the feasibility of the threat, and both South East Coast Ambulance Service and West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service put on standby.
Meanwhile, all staff and officers at Shoreham police station were alerted to the incident and advised not to open any mail.
The call was traced back to a public phone box in Shoreham High Street, and officers were deployed to the scene. The suspect was located and arrested within 30 minutes of making the call, and emergency services were stood down 15 minutes later after the divisional response inspector and critical incident manager confirmed the threat was a hoax.
Osbourne, 60, pleaded guilty to the offence at Brighton Magistrates’ Court earlier this month and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay a £128 victim surcharge.
Detective Constable Noel Simmonds said: “This bomb hoax was made the morning after Sir John Saunders published his first report on the Manchester Arena bombing, a sad reminder of why emergency services have to take such threats seriously. Whilst this incident turned out to be a hoax it was only the swift and thorough investigation that prevented serious disruption to the community.
“I would like to thank all of the emergency services involved in this incident, and Brighton and Hove Magistrates for demonstrating that the courts will deal robustly with this kind of behaviour.”
