Blackmailer jailed for fake collar bomb threat
London, Nov 20 (IANS)
A man has been awarded 10 years in jail for subjecting an Australian teenager to 12 hours of trauma by attaching a fake collar bomb around her neck.
Judge Peter Zahra, while jailing Paul Douglas Peters, said in the New South Wales Supreme Court that the terror the 18-year-old would have felt "cannot be described", Daily Times reported.
Wearing a rainbow-coloured ski mask, Peters, now 52, broke into her family's home in the wealthy Sydney suburb of Mosman last Aug and strapped a black metal box around Madeleine's neck with a bicycle chain.
A note attached to the device - which was finally found to be a hoax - was an extortion threat aimed against her parents, along with a warning that the box contained sophisticated plastic explosives.