A NORTH-EAST man who plotted mass murder with a bomb he designed in his prison cell could have to be locked up for psychiatric treatment.

A psychiatrist has found that, while Lee Flaherty, 24, is not so dangerous that he needs to be held in jail indefinitely for the protection of the public, he does suffer from mental problems that require urgent treatment.

If a judge agrees, Flaherty is likely to be detained in the unit for dangerously disturbed inmates at Frankland Prison, in Durham.

Flaherty, formerly of Grange Road, Darlington, was due to be sentenced at Carlisle Crown Court yesterday, after writing letters from his prison cell, threatening to kill all the people who he claimed had “terrorised”

his family.

But the case was adjourned until July 1 to give the judge more time to consider how best to deal with him.

Flaherty was jailed for three years in 2009 after phoning Darlington Memorial Hospital and Scarborough Hospital, posing as a member of the Army’s bomb disposal squad and warning that bombs had been planted there.

As a result, patients were evacuated and emergency cases diverted to other hospitals.

In October 2009, he was moved to Haverigg Prison, in Cumbria, to complete the sentence, and it was there that staff found a list of the 23 people he wanted to kill – along with a diagram of a potentially lethal bomb – in his cell.

Flaherty has pleaded guilty to three charges of making threats to kill in letters sent to his prison probation officer, his psychiatrist and the Supreme Court, in London.

He wrote to Michael Queen, Haverigg’s mental health practitioner, saying he was dreaming of “hurting”

people.

He said he wanted to “tie them up, set fire to them and blow them and their families up”.

In a letter to Gary Thorpe, one of the prison’s probation officers, he said he had enough knowledge “to cause destruction” and admitted he should not be released from prison because he was “capable of bad things”.

In the final letter, posted to the Supreme Court, in Parliament Square, London, he listed the ingredients needed to build a bomb and added: “I am an extremist and converting to Islam.”

At a previous hearing, defence counsel Andrew Fitzpatrick described Flaherty as “attention-seeking, grandiose, egocentric, feigning and exaggerating”, but said that, though he was suffering from “personality disorders of one kind or another”, there was no suggestion that he was mentally ill.

He said it was clear that Flaherty had intended the recipients of his letters to believe he was serious about the threats, but that did not mean he would have carried them out.