British mother jailed for gunpoint kidnap

A British woman woke up in an Oregon prison cell yesterday at the start of a sentence of seven and a half years for her part in seizing back her three daughters from state welfare workers last year.

Her American husband, who brandished a gun at the social workers, was given 12 and a half years. The couple, Ruth and Brian Christine, who met at the University of Kent at Canterbury in the middle Nineties, were convicted in May for snatching the girls at gunpoint. A state judge handed down the sentences, seen by supporters as unduly harsh, in Roseburg, Oregon, on Tuesday.

The couple's travails began in July 2000 while they were touring the United States in a battered converted bus. They were passing through the scenic Grant's Pass in Oregon when officials with the state's child protection agency raided the bus and seized the girls.

The department was acting on a tip from an anonymous caller who had said the girls appeared to be undernourished and mistreated. The daughters, Bethany, aged six, Lydia, four, and Miriam, three, have since been adopted by Ruth Christine's mother, who lives in Cornwall.

At the sentencing, Christine wept openly. "I didn't believe this day would come. Today, all I want is to be with my husband and children. Those are my only desires in this whole world." She has two other infant children who have been taken in by her husband's parents.

The Christines' case has become a rallying cry for anti-government activists who are large in number in the American north-west. Defending the right of parents to lead an alternative lifestyle, many of them protested outside the courthouse whenever the case was being heard.

The botched abduction was in August last year. Workers with the child protection agency were driving the girls to their foster family when Ruth and Brian Christine confronted them on a roadside and seized back the three girls. Brian Christine placed a Magnum pistol to the head of one of the workers.

The pair, who had exchanged their bus for a car, managed to escape Oregon and cross with the children into Montana. Soon afterwards, however, they were stopped for speeding in Montana. They were taken into custody and their children were once again removed from them. Brian Christine told Judge William Lasswell on Tuesday that he would not beg for mercy but put his fate in the hands of God. "All the things I have ever done have been for my wife, who I would give my life for, and my children, who I have given my life for," he said in court.

At their trial, a doctor testified that the three girls were indeed malnourished when they were first taken into state care. He also said that a cut on Lydia's head had given off an odour so powerful that it had driven people from the room.

Police added that Lydia had told them she had become cut after her father swatted her on the head and knocked her down the step of the bus for wetting her bed. The Christines are facing another trial on child mistreatment charges.

In attempting to turn public opinion against prosecutors, anti-government sympathisers established the Christine Defence Fund to solicit funds and posted a website on the internet under the address warontyranny.com. They were defended without fee by Ed Steele, an Oregon lawyer.

"People have got to wake up and realise what is happening right here in America," said Mr Steele, who booked the couple on several television programmes, including ABC's Good Morning America. "While they worry over non-citizens' rights in military tribunal trials, far worse things are done to our friends and neighbours in these secret child custody proceedings."