A man has been found guilty of possessing the bodies of wild birds of prey that were dumped alongside 50 dead hares outside a village shop in Hampshire.

Traces of James Kempster’s DNA were found on the bodies of a barn owl and kestrel that were rammed into the handles of the volunteer-led shop in Broughton.

However, magistrates in Southampton said the evidence did not show Kempster, 39, was a hooded person who threw the hares on to the paved area in front of the shop, left the birds in the door and smeared blood on the windows. They cleared him of criminal damage.

The court heard that Kempster, a roofer and father of three from Totton in the New Forest, has criminal convictions for poaching and will be sentenced over the birds of prey in June.

Magistrates were told that three men went to the shop in the early hours of 15 March 2024 and turned it into a “horror movie scene”. A Suzuki Vitara 4x4 they used to get to the village was found burnt out a few miles away.

The incident left residents of the village, home to about 1,000 inhabitants, unsettled and upset and prompted an investigation by Hampshire police officers, who obtained DNA samples from the deceased owl and kestrel.

Techniques for obtaining samples from animal carcasses have improved, partly thanks to work in Scotland where raptor persecution is a problem.

Kassandra Harris, an expert in DNA profiling, told the court the DNA found on the owl came from two people. She said: “It’s a billion times more likely the DNA originates from James Kempster and another individual [unrelated to him] rather than two individuals unrelated to James Kempster.”

When interviewed by police, Kempster denied being involved in the attack on the shop but admitted he knew Broughton because his father used to keep horses there.

In the witness box, Kempster repeatedly denied being involved and said he had no idea how his DNA got on the carcasses.

He was found guilty of two counts of possessing a live or dead wild bird under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. The maximum penalty is six months in prison.

Adam Cooper, prosecuting, said: “This case is about a horror movie scene outside Broughton community shop.”

Dagan James, a farmer who helped clear the hares and birds, told the court some had been freshly killed.

Cooper had claimed Kempster was the man who dumped the hares and birds of prey but the magistrates said the evidence did not show this to be the case.

The mystery of who left the hares and birds at the shop remains. Speaking after the case, rural crime experts said people sometimes left hare carcasses as a warning or means of intimidation.

Philip Wilkinson, the police and crime commissioner for the neighbouring county of Wiltshire, and a board member on the National Rural Crime Network, said bodies of hares were often left by people to make an aggressive statement.

A line of hares was placed across his driveway, which he puts down to a police campaign against the crime of hare coursing.

“It’s intimidation. It’s signalling: ‘Aren’t we clever, what are you going to do about it?,’” said Wilkinson, explaining that the isolation of rural communities made them vulnerable. “Our farmers and people who live in the country are being terrified by incidents like this.”

People who carried out such acts were not always taken seriously enough by the courts, Wilkinson said. “We have caught 22 hare coursers this season and the maximum penalty was £350. They are causing thousands of pounds worth of damages to crops, to fences, to gates. They are terrifying people.”

Ruth Tingay, a co-director of the conservation group Wild Justice, said: “Usually the perpetrators are keen to hide the evidence and either burn or bury the corpses, or sometimes they are thrown into a river. It’s hard to get into the mind of somebody who would do something this depraved.”

“The sheer number of animals that were killed and deposited outside the Broughton shop on this occasion was appalling, and we simply will not tolerate our communities being terrorised in this manner.”