Former SNP councillor sent racist texts to secret lover
A former aide to a senior SNP MP has been convicted of sending a string of racist text messages to his married lover in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks.
Craig Melville, 37, who resigned as an SNP councillor in Dundee and an aide to Stewart Hose over the allegations, sent the messages to Nadia El-Nakla, a case worker for health minister Shona Robison, on the night of the 2015 Bataclan attacks.
They were later found by Miss El-Nakla's husband when he searched her phone after discovering the pair were having an affair.
Miss El-Nakla told Dundee Sheriff Court she started working at the party's Dundee offices in January 2014 and in April began an "on off, intimate" affair with Melville, who married his fiancée later that year.
She said she was at home on the night of the Paris attacks and in the early hours of the morning she received a drunken call from Melville, who then sent text messages.
One read: "It's not personal I just f*****g hate your religion and I'll do all in I'm life do defeat your filth." Another text attacked “horrible murdering Islamic *****".
Miss El-Nakla said her now estranged husband, Fariad Umar, had taken her phone from her after discovering a text from Melville's number and downloaded 14,000 pages of information from her phone, including many deleted texts.
Mr Umar, 39, confronted his wife and when she denied the affair the IT specialist used data recovery software to retrieve text messages.
He later collated them on a disc that was subsequently passed to police. The messages shown in court included sexual messages mixed among mundane conversation and the racist content.
Mr Umar said: "Initially I was only thinking about the affair, but later I thought that someone in his elected position shouldn't have these views so I sent them to MSPs and his bosses."
Melville, from Dundee, was fined £1,000 after being found guilty of behaving in a threatening and abusive way towards his former lover by sending messages containing “threatening, abusive and derogatory remarks regarding Muslims".
Defence solicitor Douglas McConnell said his client had lost his career in politics and was now working as a personal trainer.