A ROBBER threatened to burn shop staff with acid before fleeing with cigarettes and cash from the terrified workers.

Christopher Bowlt, 30, forced his way into the store in disguise and demanded his loot should be put into a carrier bag.

He warned: "If you don't, I'm going to squirt this bottle of acid all over you. It burns through your skin and bones in 20 seconds."

Bowlt was carrying a milkshake bottle with 'acid' scrawled on it in marker pen, Teesside Crown Court was told yesterday (Tuesday, April 2).

After fleeing from the shop in Hartlepool, the raider was chased by the brave workers and detained until police arrived.

Judge John Walford praised the pair's courage and blamed Bowlt's drug addiction and debts to dealers for the crime.

He told the dad-of-two: "It has blighted your life and as a result of it blighting your life, you decided to blight the lives of others.

"It is a measure, perhaps, of the grip in which drugs hold people, who, when they are unaffected by them, can be decent, law-abiding and hard-working.

"When they are in the grip of drugs or, as in your case, in the grip of drug dealers with their evil tentacles, then they behave in a way which is not only harmful to society, but harmful to the people directly affected by their criminal behaviour."

The court heard that Bowlt had small amounts of amphetamine and heroin on him when he was arrested on February 12.

A short time before the raid, the unemployed window cleaner snatched a handbag from a car while its owner strapped children in the back.

He admitted charges of robbery, theft and possessing Class A and Class B drugs, and was jailed for three years and four months.

Jim Withyman mitigating, described the hold-up as "amateurish" and said the bottle did not contain acid.

"He has in the pas been a hard-working man, a family man," said Mr Withyman. "He is now estranged from his family. His partner could not deal with his intermittent drug use."

The court heard that Bowlt, of Keswick Street, Hartlepool, paced up and down outside the shop in Osborne Road "soul-searching" about whether to raid it.

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