A FANTASIST who made bomb hoax calls to hospitals was yesterday sent back to jail for another three years for threatening mass murder with a bomb he designed in his prison cell.

Lee Flaherty, 24, was jailed for three years in 2009 for causing the emergency evacuation of Darlington Memorial Hospital and Scarborough Hospital after bomb hoaxes.

And yesterday, he was given a sentence of the same length for the threats he made while serving that one.

Flaherty, formerly of Grange Road, Darlington, pleaded guilty at Carlisle Crown Court to three charges of making threats to kill.

Flaherty, described by his barrister as “attention seeking, grandiose, egocentric, feigning and exaggerating”, was charged after he sent letters from his cell in Haverigg Prison, Cumbria, threatening to kill the 23 people he blamed for his predicament.

In January last year, he wrote to Michael Queen, Haverigg’s mental health nurse, 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.

“I am angry,” he wrote. “I am going to get all of them. They will all pay.”

Shortly afterwards, he wrote a similar letter to Gary Thorpe, one of the prison’s probation officers, in which he threatened: “I will not stop until all have paid for what they have done to my family.”

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”.

The final letter was posted to the Supreme Court in Parliament Square, London, in September.

In it, he listed the ingredients needed to build a bomb and said: “I am an extremist and converting to Islam.”

He signed all the letters with his name, address and his prison number.

When his prison cell was searched, officers found a diagram of a potentially-lethal bomb, based, he told them, on information he had gleaned from a book borrowed from the prison library.

Flaherty’s barrister, Andrew Fitzpatrick, argued that he needed help for a personality disorder, which a psychiatrist had said would lead him to make further threats and bomb hoaxes in the future unless treated.

But he accepted that the best place for him to receive such treatment would be in Frankland Prison, near Durham City, but he could not go there unless he was jailed for seven years or more.

Alternatively, he said, he could be set free to live in a bail hostel, so his suitability for treatment in the community could be assessed.

But Judge Barbara Forrester rejected that option, saying prison was inevitable.

She told Flaherty: “From everything I have read about you, and from what you have said yourself in the past, there is little to indicate that you would be prepared to co-operate with the probation service.

“You seem to be intent on following your own line, whatever it is, rather than following other people’s advice.”