A MAN who brought chaos to a community by sparking a bomb scare has been jailed.

Pascal Knorr-Gulde made the device look so convincing that neighbours feared for their lives.

Scores of people were evacuated from their homes and nearby roads cleared before experts from the Royal Navy blew it up.

Today he is behind bars for what police described as a “malicious and vindictive act”.

Southampton Crown Court heard how Knorr-Gulde, 42, was angry that the owners of the property where he was a tenant had asked him and his girlfriend Heather Munday to leave because it needed doing up.

He was also convinced a neighbour, Jill White, had been going into the house.

So he made a fake bomb and planted it in the back garden.

Daily Echo:

The fake bomb made by Pascal Knorr-Gulde

Bernice Baker, joint owner of the house in Manor Farm Road, Bitterne Park, Southampton, told the court how she felt at seeing the device.

“My initial reaction was disbelief. I saw wires coming out of the battery. I definitely believed it was a bomb. My sister told me to ring the police. I was afraid it would explode and kill me,” she said.

The court heard Mrs White had received notes from Knorr-Gulde and in one he called her “a nightmare neighbour”.

Mrs White told jurors that seven days before the device was found, he called at her house.

Denying she had been a nightmare neighbour, she told the court: “He shouted through the door he had booby trapped 269 (the house number) and nobody should go into it. He then left.”

The court heard the police called in a Royal Navy bomb expert who blew up the device which had been placed by the back gate.

Daily Echo:

Police sealed off the area before calling in Royal Navy explosives experts to blow up the device

Knorr-Gulde, 42, of Bond Road, Southampton, had denied placing an article with the intention of making another person to believe it was likely to explode and thereby cause personal injury and damage.

He claimed he had created a cattle prod for self defence because he had twice been burgled in the past. He could not explain how the device came to be found by the gate.

Jurors took less than two hours to reject his defence.

Jailing Knorr-Guide for 30 months, Judge Nicholas Rowland told him he had gone to some length to make the device to look genuine.

“Bernice Baker was terrified when she saw it. The disruption you caused was significant and a bomb disposal officer had to come and deal with it. You did it because of some slight against the Baker sisters,” he said.

The judge also banned Knorr-Gulde from contacting the two sisters and Mrs White under a restraining order.

Knorr-Gulde was cleared of a second charge of illegally possessing six cartridges, found in a police search of the house, which he said had been left by a friend.

After the hearing, Detective Constable Steve Thomas, officer in the case, said: “This was a malicious, vindictive act which was intended to terrify victims and caused massive disruption in the area.”