Fettesgate was the term given to a major scandal involving the

Lothian and Borders Police Lothian and Borders Police was the territorial police force for the Scottish council areas of the City of Edinburgh, East Lothian, Midlothian, Scottish Borders and West Lothian between 1975 and 2013. The force's headquarters were in Fett ...

force in the 1990s, from its Fettes Avenue headquarters near

Fettes College Fettes College () is a co-educational private boarding and day school in Craigleith, Edinburgh, Scotland, with over two-thirds of its pupils in residence on campus. The school was originally a boarding school for boys only and became co-ed in ...

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

. The "Fettesgate scandal", as the incident was quickly called, began in the early hours of 19 July 1992, when burglars spent three hours in the Fettes headquarters of the police force. The break-in, through an unsecured window of the Scottish Crime Squad’s ground-floor offices in the HQ building, led to several confidential documents being stolen and

Animal Liberation Front The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) is a Far-left politics, far-left international, Leaderless resistance, leaderless, decentralized movement that emerged in Britain in the 1970s, evolving from the Bands of Mercy. It operates without a formal lead ...

slogans being sprayed on the walls. Two journalists who reported on the incident after receiving tip-offs were arrested: *Alan Muir, a reporter for ''

The Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot Plasma (physics), plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as ...

'', wrote a story based on an anonymous telephone call on the day of the incident, and was detained for six hours, and *Ron McKay, a journalist for ''

Scotland on Sunday ''Scotland on Sunday'' is a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published in Edinburgh by National World and consequently assuming the role of Sunday sister to its daily stablemate ''The Scotsman''. It was originally printed in broadsheet format but in ...

'' found documents after another anonymous call six days later. When he wrote a story based on the documents, he was arrested at dawn, while at his girlfriend's house in Chatham,

Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...

. He was held overnight, and charged with reset, the crime under

Scots law Scots law () is the List of country legal systems, legal system of Scotland. It is a hybrid or mixed legal system containing Civil law (legal system), civil law and common law elements, that traces its roots to a number of different histori ...

of receiving stolen property. The charges were dropped six months later. The stolen documents concerned the police's use of "telephone metering"; recording the destination and duration of suspects'

telephone A telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that enables two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most ...

calls, without listening in on them. Although this was regarded as legal, the controversy led to a debate about privacy and what safeguards were needed regarding information gathered in this way. The theft of such sensitive material from what should have been such a secure place—a police headquarters—led to questions about the competence of the Lothian and Borders force to take charge of the European summit in Edinburgh later that year. It transpired that the Animal Liberation Front had not been involved in the break-in. The chief constable later admitted that the treatment of Mr McKay was tactless and apologised to the editor of ''Scotland on Sunday''. Nobody has been charged with the break-in. The return of the sensitive files was allegedly the result of senior detectives reaching an immunity deal with a man close to the city’s gay criminal underworld. An internal report is believed to have been completed by the police force on the matter, but has never been released to the public.

References

{{reflist Law enforcement in Scotland Scandals in Scotland History of Edinburgh