A rogue postie has been handed a six-month suspended sentence for burning thousands of items of direct mail – including campaigns by More Th>n and Direct Line – which, he claimed, were too much of a burden for him to carry.
Abdul Gafur of Ilford, Essex, objected to putting the mail through doors on his rounds, so instead he burned some and kept piles more in the garden of his home, where investigators found nearly 1,500 items of unopened mail.
Nicholas Ham, counsel for the 57-year-old postman, whose round was in Loughton, told Chelmsford Crown Court: “He was effectively incapable of delivering the vast load of junk mail.”
However, imposing a six month jail sentence suspended for 18 months and ordering Gafur to carry out 120 hours of unpaid work, Judge Anthony Goldstaub QC said that Royal Mail was “a distinguished British postal institution renowned for its reliability”.
Michael Orsulik, prosecuting for the Royal Mail, said they investigated after receiving a phone call and found door to door items in piles in Gafur’s front garden. He said that he had also found some fully addressed post from a Royal Mail pouch which Gafur had inadvertently put on the fire.
Judge Goldstaub told him : “Your job required you to deliver items – instead of delivering them you stored them at your own home and they were never delivered,” adding that what he had done was “a breach of trust”.
