Lawrence 'wants Met heads to roll'

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 07 Maret 2014 | 19.13

7 March 2014 Last updated at 11:53

The mother of murdered Stephen Lawrence wants officers accused of wrongdoing over the case to be "routed out" and face criminal charges, her lawyer says.

Imran Khan told the BBC police failings went to "the highest level" and Doreen Lawrence wanted "heads to roll".

A public inquiry into undercover policing was ordered as a review found a Met officer had spied on her family.

Baroness Lawrence wanted Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to ensure the Met co-operated "fully", he said.

The review, by Mark Ellison QC, also found it could not be ruled out that corruption may have compromised the investigation.

It was one of several revelations to emerge about the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in the review of the original handling of Stephen's 1993 murder case.

Stephen's father, Neville Lawrence, has expressed doubts that the judge-led public inquiry will be able to uncover the truth.

Sir Bernard has not commented on the developments.

'Complete honesty'

On Thursday, Home Secretary Theresa May told MPs the findings in the Ellison report had damaged the police and ordered the public inquiry.

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The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS)

  • The SDS was a top secret squad within the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, and was operational from 1968 - in the wake of violent anti-Vietnam War demonstrations - to 2006
  • It specialised in the long-term undercover deployment of officers into a range of groups that had the potential to cause serious public disorder or other violence or injury
  • Officers who carried out undercover work for the SDS were given a lifetime guarantee by the Met that their identity would be protected
  • In his report, Mark Ellison QC said there were many examples of SDS undercover officers running great risks to themselves in order to gain very valuable intelligence
  • The group searched gravestones for the names of young children who would have been a similar age to provide an under cover identity
  • The group reportedly became known as "the hairies" because of the long hair and beards considered essential to blend in with some of the the groups being targeted

The Ellison report found an SDS "spy" had worked within the "Lawrence family camp" during the Macpherson Inquiry, conducted in the late-90s to look at the way the police had investigated the murder of Stephen.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Friday, Mr Khan said that police failings in the handling of the Stephen Lawrence case went to "the highest level" but no officer had been held to account.

"What we want now is evidence... in the open, [and for] those officers to be either routed out or to face, as Doreen wants, criminal prosecution. And indeed, as far as she's concerned, those officers at a senior level who made mistakes or otherwise acted improperly - for their heads to roll," he said.

Mr Khan also stressed that police had not been open with the original Macpherson Inquiry and there were now "serious questions to be answered".

"We want Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to say with complete honesty [and] transparency, 'We are going to cooperate fully, we are going to give everything.'"

He added that while a judge-led inquiry would be able to order documents and witnesses, "you need to know those documents exist and those people exist who can answer questions".

"And what we want to ask Sir Bernard is, 'What do you have, have you given everything, or are you obfuscating as occurred during the Macpherson Inquiry?'"

'Vindicated'

On Thursday, Mr Lawrence told BBC Newsnight he had felt "devastated" by the latest revelations.

"To hear this being said on TV so the wider world could hear, I was vindicated.... if people had listened to us earlier on maybe things would have been different.

"From what happened with the Macpherson Inquiry, I'm very, very wary about what's going to happen now."

Neville Lawrence

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Neville Lawrence: "I will never be able to trust these people"

Stephen, a black teenager, was 18 when he was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths in Eltham, south-east London, in April 1993.

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Stephen Lawrence murder

Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, 18, was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a gang of white youths as he waited at a bus stop in Eltham, south-east London, in April 1993.

A number of suspects were identified soon after the attack but it took more than 18 years to bring his killers to justice.

Several attempts to prosecute the suspects, including a private prosecution by the family, failed owing to unreliable or insufficient evidence.

In 1997, then Home Secretary Jack Straw ordered a public inquiry into the killing and its aftermath after concerns about the way the police had handled the case.

Sir William Macpherson, a retired High Court judge, led the inquiry. He accused the police of institutional racism and found a number of failings in how they had investigated the murder.

In January 2012, Gary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty of the murder by an Old Bailey jury after a review of the forensic evidence.

However, it was not until 2012 that Gary Dobson and David Norris were found guilty of murdering him and sentenced to minimum terms of 15 years and two months and 14 years and three months respectively.

Mrs May said she had commissioned Mr Ellison, and the Crown Prosecution Service and attorney general, to conduct a further review into cases involving the SDS - a top secret Met Police squad that had been operational between 1968 and 2006.

She said: "In particular, Ellison says there is an inevitable potential for SDS officers to have been viewed by those they infiltrated as encouraging, and participating in, criminal behaviour. We must therefore establish if there have been miscarriages of justice."

Mr Ellison's report said that in 1993, at a cost of "millions of pounds", the then Met Commissioner Paul Condon authorised a "top secret anti-corruption intelligence initiative" called Operation Othona.

It operated "fully outside" the Met, gathering intelligence by "various sensitive and covert means" from 1994 to 1998.

The report said the Met "has been unable to locate" the Operation Othona intelligence that existed by 1998, with the exception of a hard drive created in 2001 and found in a cardboard box in 2013 at the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards.

"We have very recently been informed that in 2003 there was 'mass shredding' of the surviving hard copy reports generated by Operation Othona," the report added.

It said the "chaotic state" of Met Police records meant a public inquiry might have "limited" potential to find out more information.


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