A FORMER RAF man escaped a jail sentence after he admitted hacking into a rival website for reuniting members of the armed forces.

Swindon-based website Forces Reunited was sabotaged by the jealous owner of a rival website, destroying data from thousands of members.

John Thornley was yesterday sentenced to 60 hours of community service for the damage he inflicted on the website.

Chippenham Magistrates Court heard that the 31-year-old uploaded a program which caused members' details to be deleted after becoming mistakenly convinced that his rival had stolen email addresses from his own site, uploaded viruses to his computers and criticised him in a website review.

Defending him, Richard Williams, said that Thornley, of Lancashire, had a long-running online battle with Dominic Hayhoe, owner of Forces Reunited.

The two ran rival websites specialising in re-uniting ex-servicemen, although Thornley's site, www.biscuitsbrown.co.uk, was run as a hobby. Thornley, himself a former member of the RAF, admitted to police that he had signed up to Forces Reunited using the name Harry Potter. Once he was signed up, he hacked in on four occasions and removed crucial data.

Prosecuting, Colin Meere told Chippenham magistrates that Mr Hayhoe had to work many hours of extra time to try and fix the problem.

He estimated that around 1,500 people's data had been lost during the attacks, which happened in November and December 2003.

The court was told that Mr Hayhoe could have gone bankrupt if he had not kept copies of the deleted data.

Thornley was arrested at his home in Chorley, Lancashire last March and immediately confessed to police what he had done. He had also kept copies of the deleted data in case Mr Hayhoe could not fix the problem.

Chairman of the bench Caroline McClean told Thornley that the maximum term for computer hacking was five years in prison. However, magistrates decided to be lenient in view of his previous good character and the fact that he had co-operated with police, saving police computer experts many hours of painstakingly following the traces of the uploads.

He was also ordered to pay £55 court costs, coupled with £520 damages to Mr Hayhoe to compensate for the money he had to pay to the web designer to rectify the problem.

Speaking after the hearing, DC Clive Bowyer, of Wiltshire police, said: "Although the offender may have lived and operated at the other end of the country, the outcome demonstrates that by working closely with the internet service providers and the victims in such cases to amass intelligence and evidence, Wiltshire Constabulary's High Tech Crime Unit will ensure that these hackers have nowhere to hack and hide."

Tamsin Davis