A rampage that ended in an assault on a regional newspaper reporter who was sitting at his desk in the newsroom has landed a teenager in jail for eight months.

The yob confessed in court to the assault on Galloway Gazette chief reporter Adrian Braddy, and also admitted a breach of the peace from a different occasion and to a further breach of the peace and possession of a sword.

The news office drama began when the accused challenged former community council secretary Peter Williams to a fight with an ornamental sword.

The teenager then ran off – and seeing newspaper staff looking down at him from their office window, threw stones through one of them, smashing the glass and narrowly missing Adrian and his colleagues Sally Houston and Mabel Russell.

The editor, Peter Jeal, a former policeman, gave chase to the culprit.

Adrian told Holdthefrontpage: “I was sitting at my desk and heard the commotion then turned around to see what was going on.

“There were three of us there, looking out and that’s when he started throwing stones at us.

“Mabel, our copytaker, was convinced she’d been hit and dived for cover under the table.

“It just missed the computers and landed on a colleague’s desk.

“It’s not something that happens every day – I was finding broken glass on my desk for ages.”

Two months before the Gazette incident the teenager ran amok in a post office after staff refused to cash a giro from his girlfriend’s benefit book, throwing books from a display cabinet at the counter staff, who were protected by a screen. The second set of offences was compounded because they were committed while he was on bail.