The Trial of Timothy Rustige – Part 1

Timothy Rustige Trial Part 1

We were up early, 4am, for our journey down to Dublin.  It was perfect weather, 2C in the West, 4C in Dublin.  Terminal 2 was very quiet, only a few last minute stragglers for the rugby match at Twickenham that afternoon.  Our plane to Aberdeen had real propellers, a brand new AVT something or other.  We landed in Scotland in bright sunshine and 9C. It was a big day of rugby, all the pubs were packed out.  Scotland v Italy were first up and I thought I would watch the second game, Ireland v England.  I tried three pubs, there were bouncers on doors letting nobody else in.  I gave up and went and watched it in solitary confinement in my hotel room.

Up at 6.00am Sunday 23^rd February 2014, a momentous day in our lives, the start of a week we thought at the time was full of promise but deteriorated very quickly.  The reason for our visit, Helen my wife, accompanied me, was that for some years I have been supporting the Hollie Greig campaign seeking justice for a young Downes Syndrome girl from Aberdeen, who was systematically raped by a ring of Aberdeen professional and legal people led by her father Dennis Mackie.  Robert Green, a Warrington man, more than anybody has brought this campaign to the attention of the public and has been imprisoned for his actions.  His main grief being the inaction of the ex-Procurator Fiscal of Grampian region, Elish Angiolini, a scrawny Govan chancer of a lawyer, who refused over a ten year period to investigate the case with the police.  She went on to be Procurator Fiscal for Scotland and then Lord Advocate until she retired nearly two years ago, at the early age of 50, to become Principal of St Hugh’s College in Oxford.  Some might consider this to be a bolt hole, well constructed by the establishment.

Robert Green continued the campaign when he was released from prison in 2012 after being given a 12 month sentence for his alleged Breach of Peace and others fuming at the injustice joined the fray including a fellow from Altrincham, Timothy Rustige, who managed a blog called Rusty’s Skewed News Views and the organisation he was connected with, Prisoners of Conscience, ran an e-mail campaign on the announcement of Angiolini’s insertion as Principal of St Hugh’s.  They tried to tell as many people concerned with this appointment of the dangers of employing Angiolini with all its baggage.  This infuriated Angiolini that much she had the Grampian Police invade Manchester and arrest Timothy at his home in Altrincham and they confiscated all his computer equipment.  He was arrested for causing her “fear and alarm” a criminal matter and not under defamation, which she pleaded later in court was what it was, the criminal route being more able to control.  Since then he has been arrested three or four times, held for a short time and then told to find his own way home.  The last time was 19^th February this year, five days before his postponed trial date.  The now Scottish Police considered he was a flight risk even though he showed them his plane ticket to Aberdeen and his hotel reservation and while they were at it they confiscated more computer equipment. Timothy appeared in court the next day, Thursday 20^th February 2014.  The local Sheriff immediately threw the case out but Timothy still had to fly back to Manchester at his own cost.  To my mind Scottish legal intimidation knows no bounds.

The case now starts tomorrow, Monday 24^th February 2014.  Robert Green was going to be Timothy’s main witness, but no, Robert had been arrested on 12^th February for alleged breach of bail conditions and was incarcerated in Perth prison, awaiting indictment.  Would you believe they, the Scottish legal thugs, can hold a person for 110 days prior to indictment and we are expecting not to see Robert, if at all we do see him, until early June.  We do understand however that he is being treated very well by the Governor and staff at Perth but it is no place to be for a 68 year old man when young murderers and thugs run free on bail and young children being raped and not investigated with all the evidence available.  The main result of all this blatant victimisation is that Robert will not now appear for Timothy.

Timothy is due in Aberdeen today, 23^rd February 2014 and we have arranged to stay in the same hotel, we await his presence with anticipation.  We have never met but corresponded frequently over the last while.  He is due at 1.00 pm and meets his legal aid team at 4.00pm, so we should have time for a preliminary chat and hopefully a glass of beer this evening.  Over the last few days, even with the tribulations of arrest Timothy has appeared fairly sanguine about the whole affair refusing to let the Stasi/Gestapo behaviour of Scottish Police get to him, in fact he has been laughing at their behaviour.  Let me just say that Timothy is a 65 year old man, yes another pensioner hoicked out of his home in the North West of England to face charges under a foreign jurisdiction, a jurisdiction unfathomable to most.  He has spent the last 30 odd years running Prisoners of Conscience from first of all his previous home in Manila, to now from his home in Altrincham, helping prisoners jailed for their principles all over the world.  He is well used to dictatorial police states, so these skirted Jock plods from Aberdeen do not worry him and the irony of the situation amuses him somewhat.

What is very obvious however is that the UK seems to be going down the same perfidious road as all the rest of the totalitarian states in the world.  Today Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine, tomorrow the UK, America etc. We the people will have our say and make the politicians realise they have overstepped the mark big time.  Revolution is on the way.  These suited and sometimes bewigged bastards, especially those in skirts and knives down their socks, are finished.  They do not realise how close to the tipping point they really are at.

Timothy bounds through the door of the hotel, his appearance a total surprise.  I was expecting a tall avuncular figure, slightly stooped with age but what came through the door was a fit, medium size bundle of energy, looking more like 45 than 65, with a military swagger about him, culled from his time in the Philippines when he was attached to the American Intelligence Service from his unit in the Rhodesian Army.  He is attuned to a 7.4km jog every morning and eats all the correct food and is dressed in combats.  He is ready for a fight.  We talk for an hour before he jogs off to meet his legal team and if it wasn’t obvious before, we are found to be of like minds and immediately gel.  As he said the worse they can now do is give him 12 months and that will only toughen him up, make him even tougher than he already is.  He returns even more confident and is pleased with the way his legal aid team are performing.

The real situation now is that Scottish Law is entirely and conveniently different from English Law, so how can Scottish Police come down to England and arrest a man and bring him up to Scotland to be tried for an alleged offence committed in England about an English matter, ie. Angiolini’s suitability for her new job of Principal of St Hugh’s College in Oxford.  It is now over 12 months since Timothy’s first arrest, so the matter reverts from one of solemn procedure where the trial is by jury, to one of summary procedure whereby the accused is tried by a sheriff alone.  The sheriff appointed in this case by the accuser will be jumping for joy.

Monday 24^th February 2014, we are up early to meet Belinda McKenzie for breakfast, she came off the overnight sleeper from London, Belinda has been a warrior for all things wrong in the UK and has supported Robert Green in all his travails and is today holding a demonstration outside the court with a few Scottish friends she has managed to gather through this  nightmare.  The Sheriff’s Court starts at 10.00am in Court 2, the main corridor is thronged, things go on in Aberdeen of a weekend that even the police cannot control adequately, with the oil there is a feeling of the Wild West about the place.

It becomes immediately apparent that two stories are being played out in Court 2, Timothy’s case itself and the ins and outs of the Hollie Greig affair.  The personae of Timothy’s case are Sheriff Derek Pyle, the judge who has been brought in from outside the region, the Procurator Fiscal or prosecuting counsel; McIntosh, I did not get his first name, but he has been picked from outside the region also, Edinburgh in fact; Mr David Moggach, Timothy’s legal aid barrister and Graham Morrison, Timothy’s legal aid solicitor.  The personae in the Hollie Greig affair are Sylvia Major, Ann Royal and Winifred Dragon, three middle aged and well- upholstered named abusers of Hollie Greig.  Winifred Dragon stands apart from the other two with a male escort, it seems there has been a schism and they now do not communicate.  Along with these three women sits another mysterious type, equally well up holstered, who so the word on the street informs us is a MI5 disinformation activist who goes under the name of Rachael Keely, her real name I was told is Mags O’Neill, married to some Socialist big-wig in the town.  Why she should associate herself with these women is obvious if disinformation is her ploy.  She seems anxious to talk to us all but gets no encouragement except from Belinda, who seems to know her well enough.  Sylvia Major’s husband, who was also a named abuser of Hollie Greig but carefully died some years back, was chief forensic officer for Grampian Police.  Personae connected to the two stories are Belinda McKenzie, five good men and true from Aberdeen, who have been wronged by Grampian and now Scottish Police, in abuse cases in the past and Helen and myself.  Overseeing all this rabble is the burly court police officer and the humour rationed Court Usher and the Clerk of the Court, a lady, who did nought as far as I could see until the dying minutes.

The prosecution witnesses were first up.  We had a secretary at St Hugh’s who said she received e-mails denouncing Angiolini and then in all her finery, the lady, now Dame, appeared for what was possibly two hours of questioning by Procurator Fiscal, from now on known as PF.  She spoke mainly of the Holly Greig case and tried to explain that she had nowt to do with it, that the police had examined it and said there was no case.  How they could do that without interviewing named abusers is beyond my realm of thought.  She explained how full of fear and alarm she was with this campaign against her at St Hugh’s and in fact how boring it got and how all her friends rallied round and how it had done more good than harm for her.  She had received an avalanche of e-mails from different IP addresses and that she is still receiving them, even though the courts remit is for a period during February and March 2012 and that Timothy Rutlidge sent them all, even funnily enough one from France where the well- travelled Timothy has never been.  Angiolini, for an experienced lawyer, appeared nervous in the dock, her hands trembling, her papers shaking as she explained that a mother of two children should not expect e-mails of this nature despising her sexuality.  She made one big mistake when she said she would have blamed all this bile on its source which was Ann Greig but as she knew Hollie’s mother was mentally ill and action against her would have worsened her condition, she pursued Timothy, the alleged scribe, instead.  Now this ploy was tried on Ann by the legal system 12 or 13 years ago when she first made her complaint against the paedophile ring.  They tried to section her then which the psychiatrists threw out on examination.  They did the same with Robert Green last week, all to no avail.  Old Elish, 53 years old now and who is now rather broad of beam having lost her scrawniness in the comforts of St Hugh’s armchairs, waddled off to hopefully examine her conscience, if in fact she ever had one.  One other point I noticed and thought strange for a lawyer, she rarely answered the questions put to her but went off on tangents of her own, the PF continually reining her back.

More prosecution witnesses including some police witnesses followed who continually tripped themselves up and I felt could have been more closely cross-examined by Mr Moggach.  It was the first sign that these jokers of legal aid were there only for the performance. The fourth witness a secretary from Aberdeen University gave a lovely smile to the well upholstered quartet another small sign that this game was being well managed.  The fifth witness was the star of the day when he took the stand, Detective Terry Laing of the Special Operations and Terrorism Branch of Scottish Police. 26 years a plod and no mistake, preferring to stand in the dock rather than sit as he explained his role in Operation Chronicle.  We all looked at each other, the Scottish Police certainly take things seriously when it comes to 65 year old terrorist pensioners,  seven of them had come down on a jolly two years previously to arrest a youthful 63 year old and confiscate his family’s computers.  It was obvious lies were being told and in cross-examination Moggach’s hand was very light.  I could have done a far better job myself.  It was now 5.00pm, a previous case came to light, the court was postponed for two days to reconvene on Thursday.  A nuisance costing me an extra £500 pounds but I was determined to stick this one out.  Belinda McKenzie had disappeared at lunchtime, back to London as it turned out after listening to Angiolini’s testimony.

Tim, Helen and myself went back to the hotel, chewed the cud, drank some wine, had hotel fish and chips and retired at 9.00pm.  Tuesday dawned and lots of e-mails to answer.  Our two day furlough will soon be over.  We booked our return flight for Saturday at 12.00 noon.  One piece of news I received the night before which I find intriguing is that it is almost 26 years to the day that Angiolini and that corrupt, lantern jawed BBC witch, Esther Rantzen, set up the first branch of Childline in Aberdeen.  Having been listening all week to conversations, it struck me that Aberdeen is  the epicentre of child sexual abuse in Scotland and what better place to be to have the pick of the crop.  These two marked women underline the knowledge we all have that Childline is a child molester not a child protector