US student jailed for poisoning classmate

An American student has been sentenced to three years in jail for poisoning a classmate by lacing his wine with methanol.

Alexander Hilton was jailed for three years at the High Court in Scotland for poisoning classmate Robert Forbes

Alexander Hilton, 24, encouraged Robert Forbes, both students at St Andrews University, to drink the wine containing methanol before a ball in Fife, as reported by the BBC.

Mr Forbes needed kidney dialysis after the incident in March 2011 and was left temporarily blind, but survived the ordeal. Hilton admitted assaulting Forbes in 2011 at the High Court in Edinburgh this week.

Passing sentence, judge Lord Burns described his actions as “wicked and deceitful”. Burns said Mr Forbes had now been left with the “agonising prospect of going blind in the future”.

Hilton, from Princeton in Massachusetts, had been diagnosed with a mental illness before spiking Mr Forbes’s drink, with one doctor concluding this to be the “substantial cause” of his actions. He had stopped taking prescribed medication at the time and was using alcohol and illegal drugs, which when combined brought on a psychotic illness, doctors said.

However Lord Burns said the seriousness of the offence and the fact Hilton’s own actions had contributed to his poor mental state meant he could not avoid jail. Hilton, who was extradited from the US on 7 May this year, is now the subject of a deportation order.

Methanol is used commercially as a solvent, especially in paints and varnishes, and is a constituent of some antifreeze solutions. It is often used by unlicensed brewers to produce illegal liquor, causing numerous deaths across Africa and India in recent years.

More than 100 people were admitted to hospital and at least 29 killed after drinking toxic alcohol in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh earlier this year. While six Pakistani police officers and six senior excise officials were suspended pending an investigation into the deaths of 29 people who had drunk toxic liquor laced with methanol in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.

In 2011 nearly 170 people died in the eastern state of West Bengal from alcohol poisoning, while toxic liquor claimed the lives of 107 people in Gujarat in July 2009.