A HAMPSHIRE dad who spent 33 years as a Nato intelligence officer has hit out at the "low-life" thieves who stole his ill daughter's hand-carved pumpkin.

Lindie Hopkins, 15, spent the weekend carving the eerie face in the pumpkin ready for a family Hallowe'en party on Tues-day, but on Monday, the disabled teenager was rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack.

Not wishing to let Lindie's hard work go to waste, her dad Mike and sister Lana, 22, put the pumpkin and a matching one out on their porch at Kenn-edy Road, Maybush, Southamp-ton, on Hallowe'en night.

When they returned from visiting Lindie in hospital two hours later, it had gone.

Mike, 52, said: "I was so angry that somebody would do that. It sounds silly getting upset over a stolen pumpkin, but it's the principle of the thing."

Lindie, who was adopted from Thailand by Mike and his wife Linda, 47, was discharged from hospital yesterday.