The former wife of disabled Bradford man Colin McLeod has spoken of her anger at the way he had to spend his last days.

Carole McLeod was with the police when they found the former soldier dead in his ground-floor Council flat in Church Green, Manningham. The couple were divorced several years ago but Mrs McLeod, 60, from Heaton, had kept in contact and supported the wheelchair-bound 64-year-old on his trips to hospital.

Referring to the condition of Mr McLeod's home, which had been crashed into by a stolen car on December 28, she said: "The Council should have moved him straight away - that crash happened the Thursday before New Year's Eve but he was still there when he died two weeks later.

"I saw him the day afterwards and they hadn't even boarded it up, the door was all bent and cracked and there was a terrible draft coming in. Colin was severely deaf but I just don't accept that the Council couldn't get him to open the door - if they'd have knocked loud enough and tried hard enough, he would have opened it."

Mr McLeod, who served in Africa with the Black Watch in the 1950s, had been due to move to a nearby Council flat the day he was discovered. A post-mortem found that he had died of a heart attack.

Bradford Council described the Scotsman's death as "very unfortunate" but "not directly related" to his living conditions. "Mr McLeod was due to be moved to a nearby property. We had tried several times to contact him earlier to arrange new accommodation, and couldn't get through. We had people going round there and knocking on the door several times, but there was no response."

Mrs McLeod said she and their two sons, Colin, 26, and Neil, 22, were all devastated by the loss. But she took comfort from the fact that two neighbours, Diane and Julie, who had contacted the Telegraph & Argus about his plight, had cared for him well. "They have been really good neighbours and looked after him," she said.

Family and friends will pay their last respects to Mr McLeod at a funeral service in Scholemoor Crematorium at 2pm on Wednesday.