Armed for the big kill

A RACIST who kept a huge secret stash of arms and ammunition had a sketch of a Swindon's mosque and had been stalking members of the town's muslim community, a court heard.

David Tovey, 37, pleaded guilty to three explosives charges and six weapons charges.

He was described as a cross between Hungerford gunman Michael Ryan and Soho nail-bomber David Copeland.

But he was only caught by chance when tenacious police constable Pam Delahay, who had been investigating a campaign of racist graffiti in the area, went to his house with other officers.

The extent of Tovey's white supremacist activities came to light after a jury at Oxford Crown Court found him guilty on two charges of racially aggravated criminal damage.

Former Army Military Policeman Detective Sergeant Phil Murphy said he was shocked when he searched Tovey's house and found guns stored there.

Tovey later admitted possessing a prohibited Sten gun, a pistol, a Spaz pump action shotgun, a shortened Kestrel shotgun, a night-stick adapted to fire one shotgun round and 12 rounds of 9mm ammunition. The explosive charges included one of making a napalm-type explosive.

Det Sgt Murphy said: "It blew my mind. Because of my background, I knew exactly what I was looking at which was what made it so frightening.''

The case against Tovey only included sample charges to reflect the most serious offences. Police had found numerous types of ammunition thousands of rounds in total.

In the house, north of Swindon, they also discovered NATO body armour, survival equipment, camouflage gear, CS gas and Army issue material such as night-vision glasses.

Tovey had adapted many of the guns and arms himself. With his Second World War Sten submachine gun, for example, he unblocked the barrels that had been made safe and fitted a new firing pin.

He had soldered a new barrel on the Baikal pistol and created his own fitting for a silencer.

Tovey said nothing when arrested and questioned. But police said he had been using white supremacist and US survivalist websites on his computer.

Police found a letter, magazine and newspaper from the BNP addressed to Tovey, who gave a rambling speech to the court this week about asylum seekers.

They also found the sketch of a mosque in Swindon's Manchester Road and discovered he had been stalking people in Swindon and Oxford.

He followed his targets home, taking down their car numbers. All of them were non-white - with the bizarre exception of one couple he mistook for black or Asian and who were, in fact, sporting tans from a recent holiday.

Tovey claimed he could not be racist as he liked black music naming Sade, Jimi Hendrix and jazz as his favourites and he was a fan of Red Dwarf, a television comedy featuring two black actors.

But detectives said Tovey was a strange loner a man with an unremarkable past and childhood who had no criminal record of any kind.

Detective Superintendent Steve Morrison said: "Tovey is a loner who could be living out some sort of white supremacist role but is not identified with any traditional right wing group.

"We will probably never know exactly what he was planning. But I believe one day something, an anniversary or some kind of trigger would lead to something happening.

"If at any time he was going to go on the rampage, he would have had sufficient firepower, and enough protection for himself, to be able to cause a very significant amount of damage to people, buildings and vehicles.''

Detectives said they were struck by the stark appearance of Tovey's home in Carterton, near Faringdon, as soon as they walked in.

One officer said: "It was very much a single man's place. The downstairs living room was a gymnasium with martial arts equipment.

"But there was no decoration, no wallpaper or flooring - just workbenches with chemicals and lots of wood.''

The only domestic appliance was a fridge-freezer.

The former RAF house had belonged to his parents, who both died in the 1980s, and he had lived there all his life. Tovey, described as a very skilled woodworker and craftsman had not worked for some time, living off compensation from a work accident some years before in which his hand and leg were burned when some brush cleaning fluid caught light.

He married Ouch-Yi Yip, a Hong Kong Chinese woman whom he had met while working at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, in 1989.

They moved to Birmingham, where they ran a Chinese takeaway until it went bust and they sold it around eight years ago. Mrs Tovey said their clientele was very mixed-race.

But they had lived apart since 1995 and she had no idea about his arms stash.

Following the discovery on February 14 this year, the usually quiet Oxfordshire neighbourhood was evacuated, roads sealed off and Army bomb disposal experts called in.

The search took seven days as officers found more and more arms.

Judge Mary Jane Mowat adjourned sentencing for three weeks while a psychiatric report was prepared.

One mosque and two non-white people from Swindon were targeted

HEAD of Swindon's Pakistani Welfare Association, Mohamed Salas Khan, today expressed relief that Tovey had been caught by police.

He said: "As a member of the Muslim community, we were told by Oxfordshire Police that this man had been following and making notes on members of our community.

"It is very worrying and I am so pleased that he has been caught. It seems possible that he might have wanted to hurt someone.

"As far as I am aware, no one from the Muslim community noticed that they were being followed or anything like that."

Jaginder Bassi, director of Swindon Race Equality Council, was unable to shed light on the two people Tovey targeted, but confirmed Tovey was found to have a map identifying a mosque in Manchester Road

He said: "We are pleased he has been convicted. It just goes to show people can't go out in the community stirring racial hatred.

"We are reassured Thames Valley Police took trouble and effort to talk to members of the local ethnic minority leaders by means of Swindon Race Coalition at a time when there was a heightened tension in race issues in the Swindon area. The message we would like to send out, whether people are black or white, is that if you experience racial harassment you must report it; you do not have to take it."

Inspector Bob Markham, of Swindon police's Community and Relations team, said the Tovey investigation was headed up by Thames Valley police, but Swindon police were informed about the suspect.

"There was evidence of two people from visible ethnic minorities who he had followed in Swindon," he said. "I understand he had identified one of the two mosques in the Manchester Road area.

"I am pleased with the conviction but I would like to stress that this is a very isolated series of incidents which involved one person acting alone."

Insp Markham said Swindon police played a liaison role with their Thames Valley counterparts by helping to brief Swindon Race Coalition before Tovey's trial.