A FAIFLEY man who threatened to stab four teenage boys outside a shop on a busy Clydebank road has been spared a prison term for the offence.

George Campbell was heavily drunk when he went after the group in Kilbowie Road in October 2016.

The 35-year-old was sentenced in court on Friday after pleading guilty to a charge of behaving in a threatening or abusive manner by shouting, swearing and threatening to stab the boys – who were aged 14 and 15 when the offence took place.

Sentence was deferred at a previous hearing in April for a doctor’s report on Campbell’s ability to carry out unpaid work as a punishment.

At that hearing, fiscal depute Martine McGuigan described how the boys were first approached by Campbell, who was “intoxicated but friendly”, near Clydebank Health Centre on Kilbowie Road.

But a short time later the group saw Campbell outside the Spar shop near the Kilbowie roundabout when he became much more aggressive, telling them: “I’ve got a knife and I’m not afraid to stab youse. None of youse move or you’re getting plugged.”

Campbell then went into the shop, and the boys ran away and called police.

At last month’s hearing, Campbell’s solicitor, Phil Lafferty, said the incident was “bizarre and out of character”, and acknowledged that the boys would have found what happened “extremely worrying”.

But Mr Lafferty told the hearing, at Dumbarton Sheriff Court, that his client had “virtually no memory” of what had happened because of the alcohol he had drunk before the incident.

At the same court on Friday, Mr Lafferty said the report from Campbell’s GP opened the door to a community payback order (CPO) with unpaid work as an alternative to a prison sentence.

He added: “I’ve warned him that the court will not look kindly upon a situation where the order is not complied with for reasons of poor health.”

Campbell, of Field Road, was told to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work within eight months – as an alternative to custody – and was placed under social work supervision until November 2019.

Sheriff Simon Pender told him: “This was a very unsavoury incident and is a very serious matter.”