A FIFE man who battered a 73-year-old pensioner with a lump of concrete during a drug-fuelled mugging was jailed for three-and-a-half years when he appeared at Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court yesterday.

Daniel Henderson (32), a prisoner at Perth, was found guilty after trial earlier this month of assaulting Susan Barker outside Kelty Ex-Servicemen’s Club on Cocklaw Street on January 7 by striking her on the face with a brick or a similar object causing her to be knocked to the ground.

Henderson was also found guilty of seriously injuring his victim by seizing her handbag and pulling it violently from her arm and robbing her of her handbag and its contents.

During the four-day trial, Mrs Barker was called as the first witness in the trial and described how “my face was smashed and the blood was choking me” after the assault.

She told the court that as she lay injured on the pavement she had felt “panicked, terrified and abandoned.”

Left with her upper jaw broken in two places, her nose broken and with multiple fractures in both cheekbones, Mrs Barker is still unable to go out after dark as a result of the attack.

The trial had established that Henderson had been living in Cowdenbeath at the time and had travelled to Kelty that evening to buy heroin.

He was caught just days later and has been in custody ever since, being sentenced to two years’ jail at Dunfermline High Court two weeks ago for other crimes of dishonesty.

Yesterday, Henderson’s solicitor said his client recalled nothing of his actions that night due to the narcotics he had used but was now drug-free.

After studying reports on Henderson, Sheriff Holligan said prison was “an inevitability.”

“This was clearly a very serious matter, assaulting an elderly lady and causing such injury and there can be only one disposal,” he said.

Henderson was sentenced to three years and six months, backdated to his arrest on January 12 and to be served concurrently with his present sentence.