A British farmer has been convicted of putting metal shards into jars of baby food and planting them on supermarket shelves in a scheme to extort money.
After an investigation of more than two years, Nigel Wright of Lincolnshire was convicted of three counts of blackmail and two of contaminating goods. Wright was caught on security cameras placing jars of contaminated baby food on the shelf of a Tesco supermarket in Lockerbie, Scotland. In at least two separate incidents, mothers found fragments of metal in baby food as they were feeding their children. The incidents led Tesco to recall 42,000 jars of Heinz baby food, although no further contamination was found.
Wright sent dozens of letters and emails to Tesco starting in May 2018, demanding £1.4 million ($1.8 million) in Bitcoin to make the contamination incidents stop. When police raided his sheep farm, they found drafts of extortion notes and pictures of baby food jars with knife fragments inside. One such note read, "Imagine a baby's mouth cut open and blood pouring out, or the inside of their bellies cut and bleeding. You pay, you save them." Investigators had sent him £100,000 in Bitcoin in the course of their investigation, which they recovered in the raid.
Wright faces a prison sentence of 8 to 17 years, although the judge in the case ordered a psychiatric evaluation ahead of sentencing, saying that Wright “appears to be mentally disordered.”
