A pensioner who gave a bomb-making instructions to a Right Wing extremist has escaped jail.

Judge Anthony Niblett described 74-year-old Allen Boyce's extreme political views as "abhorrent to right-minded people" after hearing the defendant had sent the instructions to a racist thug.

However, he walked free from Brighton Crown Court with a suspended sentence because of his age, lack of serious criminal convictions and the fact his bomb would not have worked.

Anti-fascist campaigners last night greeted the sentence with dismay.

Matthew Collins, once a National Front and British National Party (BNP) activist but now a director of Searchlight, which campaigns against racism and fascism, said: "We are disappointed in the sentence because he has been active in far Right politics for over 20 years. He is a miserable, arrogant fascist."

Boyce, of Old Orchard Road, Eastbourne, admitted incitement to possess explosives. The court heard his bomb-making instructions, remembered from a schoolboy chemistry lesson, were wrong and his bomb would never have exploded.

Boyce was arrested after police found the bomb instructions in a letter he sent to Terry Collins in 2004. Collins, 28, was last year jailed for five years for a terrifying race-hate campaign against ethnic families in Eastbourne.

The former BNP member, of Eshton Road, Eastbourne, targeted three families he believed were asylum seekers or immigrants.

He pelted their homes with stones, slashed tyres and damaged their vehicles. He taped a firework to a brick and hurled it through the window of one of his victims.

The letter from Boyce was found when detectives searched Collins' car. It also included a plan of the Cambridge Hotel, in Eastbourne, which, according to Boyce, housed "more than 100 bogus asylum seekers".

In the letter, dated April 2004, Boyce says he went to visit the hotel. He says: "I could not see any grinning Kosovans. Maybe they were all out shopping at the taxpayers' expense."

Stephen Shay, prosecuting, said police searched Boyce's flat and found more evidence of his Right-Wing views. He said: "The documents indicated Mr Boyce has extremely strong right-wing views and has been a member of extreme Right-Wing organisations."

Mr Shay said there was no evidence Collins ever acted on Boyce's instructions to make the bomb.

Stephen Bevan, defending, described Boyce as an eccentric outsider who, "he has rather entrenched views based on his perculiar interpretation of the Bible".

Boyce was sentenced to two years in jail suspended for two years. During that time he will be supervised by probation officers.