A former Aberdeen drugs baron was yesterday jailed for seven years after brutally stabbing a man whose girlfriend was set to give evidence against him in court.
Anthony Higgins used to make £4,000 a day selling heroin in the city after he and his brother moved from Liverpool to the north-east of Scotland to infiltrate the city’s drugs market.
He served an eight year and three month prison sentence over that operation – but stayed in the city following his release.
Last September Higgins carried out a horror knife attack on Darren Beattie in a car park yards from Aberdeen’s court building, where Mr Beattie’s girlfriend was to give evidence against him in a trial.
Sarah Algie had gone to court accompanied by Mr Beattie on September 12 last year.
She told the High Court in Aberdeen that Higgins had come to glass door of a witness room where she was waiting and said something, adding: “I could kind of lip read ‘you’re getting it’.
“I didn’t hear it because the door was closed. As soon as I saw him I looked the other way.”
Mr Beattie said that a fight had erupted in the Shiprow car park, around 100 yards from the sheriff court building, when Higgins and Mr Beattie’s group had come across each other.
He said: “I felt four, it was like, rib punches. I didn’t know I was stabbed until a couple of seconds after.
“He was holding something. I didn’t think it was a knife. I thought it was an e-cig.”
Mr Beattie said the wounds were in his back and he spent a number of weeks in hospital following the incident. He added: “I just thought I was going to die.”
Higgins, 34, of Worsley Crescent, Sparrowhill, Liverpool, denied a charge of attempted murder.
But a jury found him guilty of the lesser charge of assault to severe injury, permanent disfigurement and danger of life.
Judge Lord Uist jailed Higgins for seven years.
He said: “In order to commit this assault, which followed upon criminal proceedings against you in the sheriff court in which his partner was to have been a witness against you, you must have been in possession of a knife at the material time.
“You inflicted four stab wounds on his back, requiring him to be treated in hospital for a collapsed lung and thereafter re-admitted twice because of subsequent complications.
“The assault has had a profound impact on your victim.”
Lord Uist added: “You are now 34 years old.
“You have a lengthy criminal record dating from 2002, mainly for road traffic offences, but in November 2007 you were sentenced to eight years three months’ imprisonment for being concerned in the supplying of a controlled drug.
“Then in March 2016 you were sentenced in the sheriff court in Aberdeen to a community payback order of 80 hours unpaid work for assault to injury, your only conviction for violence.
“You have never held any long-term employment.
“Violence of the type in which you engaged on September 12 last year cannot be tolerated.”