I HAVE had my fair share of death threats and attacks over the years, but when they are directed at my family, that is when I stand up and start to fight back.

After all my investigative work I didn't think it would be an appearance on ITV's Loose Women that would incite one of the most offensive bits of abuse that has ever come my way.

The Tweet in full read: "@donal-macintyre grassing c**t, wish Chelsea kill you and your wife."

The Twitter troll was referring to an incident three years before when a group of men attacked me and my wife because I had helped jail one of their friends and associates, an infamous Chelsea hooligan called Jason Marriner.

This was beyond a joke and I decided that I would not let it stand. I would not let this coward hide behind the cloak of internet anonymity. The offensive tweet brought all the memories of the vicious assault flooding back to my wife.

Pummelled -

A "pack of wolves" - in the words of the judge - descended upon me and at least 10 men pummelled me unconscious while my wife Ameera tried to pull them off, even placing herself between the blows and my body on the floor.The attack in the Cloud 9 bar in leafy, suburban Hampton Court, Surrey, came as she was being treated for a pituitary brain tumour.

Shortly after I appeared on ITV's Loose Women I noticed the tweet appearing in my account, from one 'alexhardy93'. The spark for the tweet came presumably from something I had said on the show.

It brought it all back to me and her - the other threats, the panic attacks, the traumatic court case which saw lames Wild (49), convicted and sentenced to nearly two years in prison for assaulting a Crown Prosecution witness.

He was a childhood friend of jason 'Marriner, who I exposed as a member of the infamous Chelsea 'Headhunter' firm of football hooligans in the BBC documentary in 2000.
The idiot who had tweeted the offensive remarks had, to my mind, incited violence and made threats to kill in a manner which the law describes a 'malicious communication'.

I wanted to confront him face to face, but first 1 decided to see how the police would handle it.
Two days after I made the initial complaint, the police came back to me and said that they could not progress the case any further because Twitter was a US company and it would require a court order there to get the information about the person who sent the offensive communication.

I told them with the confidence of a cynical crime reporter, who has seen the force at their best and worst: "I had a spare 15 minutes and 1 have got his details, his family information, his old school and even his date of birth.
"I read his tweets. Then i read his friends' tweets and when it says 'happy birthday mate' on April 25, you may safely assume that was his birthday."

A cursory look at his friends' Facebook pages revealed all the relevant details of his life.

Alex Hardy was a 19-year-old Manchester City football fan that kept some 'juicy company' and liked to shout out on Twitter. He put up a very brave face online. I wondered if he would be as brave when we eventually met.

The officer said that he would pass the information on to Manchester, where Alex Hardy lived.

After two months little was done, so I decided that I had to take matters into my own hands.
The first complaint was made on April 29 and now in the dead of winter nothing had been done. I decided I would confront my Twitter troll and challenge him directly about his behaviour arave

As I was preparing to go to Stockport, in Greater Manchester, to chase down Alex Hardy at his mum's address, I received a tweet out of the blue.
It read: "In relation to my tweet on april 26th I would like to apologise to you and your wife @donalmacintyre." Where had this come from? I was determined to find out and continued my journey to meet my online abuser.

It was about five o'clock in the evening when I knocked on the pleasant £300,000 suburban house outside Stockport and met Alex Hardy's mother.

"Do you know why i am here?" i asked a woman in her 40s."1 know you, but 1 didn't expect to see you," she said. "Alex is out." "I read the tweet and if it is genuine and he says it to me in person then 1 will drop the matter," 1 said.

It seems that community officers had told Hardy all would be fine if he tweeted an apology to me. Not surprisingly he did, just 20 minutes later; without meaning a word of it presumably, I thought. Twenty fours hours later I called by the house again, but Alex was out. I tracked down some of his haunts and left my card, inviting Alex to phone.
I was determined to track down Hardy directly, but had not figured on his parents complaining to the police about alleged harassment.

His father Paul called me to Bootle Police station, in the centre of Manchester, at midnight to complain that I was handing out business cards in various pubs in Stockport trying to track his son down and that I was recording conversations.

The complaint was quickly dismissed and the next day I arranged to meet Chief Inspector Kevin Taylor.
"Listen, if it's a genuine apology and made face to face then I am happy to put this to bed right now," I told him, It's called restorative justice, a process where offenders and victims meet up, forcing the offender to understand the human cost of his crimes,

Just before the year end, Chief Inspector Taylor led me to his office and sat me down beside the bulky 19-year-old, This time there was no bravado or arrogance, He was softly spoken and it was hard to recognise the digital thug that he was months earlier, "I'm so sorry, I never knew about your wife's illness, I was just shooting off. I never meant to cause harm," he said,

Brave

"You're telling your friends some-thing different. Apparently, you want to slit my throat," I said to him. "It's easy to apologise when the police are here,but that didn't sound genuine to me."

The Inspector suggested that Hardy was just courting this aggressive opinion for the benefit of his friends and I'm sure that was the case.
In front of me was a misbehaving child in a man's body, who now was taking his punishment with some humility.

My plan was to make him accountable to his friends on Twitter - so I suggested that we photograph a handshake between us and get him to post it online.
"If you post that online with another apology that's the end of the matter," I said. I knew it would cause him pain and embarrassment.

It doesn't take too much to track down perpetrators in cyberspace and the authorities must understand that online abuse can have a much longer and lasting impact than a physical assault. I took on my Twitter troll and this time justice won, but, for the most part, I had to do it on my own.

This is something which I certainly can't recommend to everyone, but there is a great satisfaction in divorcing the Twitter troll from the cloak of anonymity and to see a young man, devoid of arrogance, finally brought to book.