After playing in a rugby game, a teenager of Pensyflog in Porthmadog of North Wales was celebrating and proceeded to get drunk and defile the war memorial by urinating on it. Police witnessed the deed and a magistrate has ordered him to complete 150 hours of community service work, the Express reports
Huw Dafydd Jones, 18 committed on the late afternoon of October 18, what has been called a “disgusting offence” against the local community. He apologized to officers upon being arrested, and admitted to a charge of outraging public decency at magistrates in Caernarfon. As his solicitor, Carys Parry spoke on his behalf, pointing out that he actually urinated on the steps of the memorial rather than on the memorial itself. “He had been drinking alcohol and did not think what he was doing,” she said. “He did not mean to be disrespectful and apologises for what he has done.”
“It is a sensitive time,” court chairman Peter Lunt Williams told him during sentencing. “Remembrance Sunday is next weekend and it is 100 years since the start of the First World War. Boys your age were being killed and injured. Last week we saw soldiers returning from Afghanistan and many have been killed and injured there.” Jones is also restricted by a weekend curfew for two months, but Mr. Williams wanted more: “Although we can’t order it, we’d like to see you clean the war memorial.”