A YOUNG hoaxer faces a £250 bill, two years of supervision and must spend 20 hours making reparation to the emergency services after he pretended to be the notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden.

The 13-year-old teenager broke his mother's phone ban when he rang police claiming there was a bomb under Selby Abbey shortly after midnight on October 18, York Youth Court heard.

Prosecutor Angela Smith said that the previous night at 2.20am he had claimed in another call that a gunman had just shot someone and, because the police didn't arrive quickly enough, rang the fire brigade claiming that someone was trapped in a burning house.

Then he and a friend watched the emergency services arrive from a window of his home while his mother slept upstairs.

"If you had been elsewhere ringing the emergency services and the fire service had been coming to your mum's house while she was in bed and the fire raged on, what would you have felt if she had been roasted in the night because your call meant the fire engine went elsewhere?" senior justice Richard Britton asked the boy.

"It wouldn't have happened," the boy said. But magistrates said it could and warned that his next court appearance would put him behind bars.

The Selby boy pleaded guilty to making a bomb hoax, two charges of making hoax calls and an unrelated offence of interfering with a vehicle.

Magistrates gave him a two-year supervision order including 20 hours' reparation to the emergency services, made him pay the full £252 bill for turning out the police for the fictitious gunman and ordered the destruction of his mobile phone. They also bound his mother over for a year in the sum of £250.

Defence solicitor Ruth Gill said he was a bored and frustrated boy.

When he made the calls, he had been drinking with an older boy and his mother had confiscated the house phone that evening.

But she did not know that a friend had given him a mobile phone and the phone company gave him £7 credit when he registered it in his name.

Updated: 08:35 Wednesday, November 21, 2001