A former Royal Marine who set off a homemade bomb in a Dundee tenement is to be released from prison today, just seven months into his three-year jail term.
Allan Peach’s improvised device a hair gel tub stuffed with explosives, blew out windows and took doors off their hinges at the building in Cullen Place last June.
The Courier understands that Peach will be released from Perth Prison today on home detention curfew to an address in Dundee, after being fitted with an electronic tag.
The 25-year-old was told by a judge that his actions had been “dangerous and reckless” when he was sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow in November.
One of the block’s residents, Peter Heggie, 55, whose door was blown in by the explosion, branded the decision to release Peach on a curfew as “ridiculous”.
He said: “It should have come under the terrorism act and he should have got 10 years. He didn’t think about anybody’s safety when he did it. He put people’s lives at risk and he could have killed us.
“You can still see the crack on the landing from when it happened. The windows blew out and our door blew wide open.
“There was an older woman in the building and she was in shock and the guy downstairs had only just moved in. It made me feel not well for a while.”
Home detention curfew, more commonly known as tagging, is the means by which some prisoners spend a proportion of their sentence confined to their home during a specified period of the day, usually for 12 night-time hours.
The tag emits an electronic signal which is monitored by a private company contracted to the prison service to ensure the prisoner does not breach the curfew.
Scottish Conservative Chief Whip John Lamont said: “Yet again we are seeing a potentially dangerous criminal not serving the full sentence that they were handed down by the court.
“Having set off two explosive devices, residents in Dundee would rightly expect Allan Peach to have been kept off their streets for longer than just seven months. Instead he is already out on a home detention curfew and is just anotherexample of the SNP’s soft-touch approach when it comes to crime.
“Jail terms are supposed to act as a deterrent, but they are constantly being undermined by cases such as this.”