An animal rights activist sent "shocking and offensive" letters to an employee at Huntingdon Life Sciences and a parish councillor living near a Staffordshire farm breeding guinea pigs for medical research, a court heard yesterday.
Birmingham Crown Court heard that Andrew Kirk sent a total of nine packages containing insults and graphic images of animals, including one delivered to the MP for Huntingdon, Jonathan Djanogly, and others to the Chief Crown Prosecutors in Durham, Humberside and Staffordshire.
Kirk (46) denies a total of 18 counts of sending obscene or indecent packages through the postal system.
Opening the case, Steven Bailey, prosecuting, told a jury of five women and seven men: "There is no dispute about what happened."
He alleged that the letters - sent between November last year and February this year - were offensive and derogatory to their recipients.
The court heard that Kirk, formerly of Middlesbrough but now of no fixed abode, sent a letter to a parish councillor living near a guinea pig farm in Newchurch, Staffordshire, and also used images of a swastika on the outside of another letter which compared Huntingdon Life Sciences to Auschwitz.
Sent in January this year to HLS's premises in Cambridgeshire, the letter was addressed to the "sons and daughters of Josef Mengele".
Other letters, headed "dear ignoramus", contained definitions of various words - such as gutless, evil, evildoer and torture - taken from Kirk's dictionary.
The jury was told that Kirk accepted that he had sent the items when he was interviewed by police earlier this year.
Mr Bailey said: "He thought that the 'extermination' of animals in the lab was akin to the Holocaust."
The trial continues.
