A man who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with offensive slogans about the murders of two police officers in a gun and grenade attack in Manchester has been jailed for eight months.
Barry Thew, 39, was seen in his home town of Radcliffe, Greater Manchester, just hours after the killings, wearing a white T-shirt with the words “kill a cop 4 fun.co.uk…HA,haaa?” scrawled on the back in black marker pen.
On the front it said: “One Less Pig… Perfect Justice”.
Less than three-and-a-half hours earlier, PCs Nicola Hughes, 23, and Fiona Bone, 32, had been gunned down in the Hattersley area of Manchester, in an incident which hit the headlines across Britain.
Both were shot dead and grenades were also thrown as they responded to what they believed to be a routine burglary call on September 16.
Thew pleaded guilty at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court to a public order offence of intention to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
He was sentenced Thursday to four months in jail and received an additional four months after he admitted breaching the terms of a previous suspended jail term.
Inspector Bryn Williams, of the Radcliffe neighbourhood policing team, described his actions as “morally reprehensible”.
“While officers on the ground were just learning of and trying to come to terms with the devastating news that two colleagues had been murdered, Thew thought nothing of going out in public with a T-shirt daubed with appalling hand written comments on,” he said.
Hundreds of people lined the streets of Manchester last week on two separate occasions for the funerals of the two women whose deaths sparked an outpouring of sympathy and support for Greater Manchester Police on Facebook and Twitter.
Dale Cregan, 29, has appeared in court charged with the murders of the two officers and those of a father and son earlier in the year.
Man jailed for offensive T-shirt after police deaths
