The five men who spent seven years in jail for conspiracy to murder are likely to have their convictions quashed this week. After Mohammed Afsar, a restaurateur, was shot and badly injured in a family feud, the men were convicted in 2011 and given sentences of up to 24 years each. They later had their cases referred to appeal judges after the emergence of secret evidence that undermined their convictions.
Omran Rashid, Wassab Khan, Abdul Jabbar, Faisal Saraj and Abdul Maroof, all from Birmingham, were jailed and their appeals, two years later, failed. They have spent seven years in jail for plotting murder in what lawyers claim is one of the worst cases of non-disclosed evidence.
Acting pro bono for the defendants, Charter Solicitors, a Leeds and Bradford law firm, said, “Police and prosecution failed to comply with the spirit of the disclosure process, whether deliberately or not. It has been reviewed ten or 12 times over the last seven years — those are the numbers of opportunities missed by the prosecutors and police.”
Alistair Webster, QC, said: “In either case, it is hard to think of a more serious perversion of the course of justice than to allow a trial on such a serious charge to take place, and convictions to be obtained, when knowingly holding material which shows that the charge should not have been brought.”
The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates potential miscarriages of justice, was alerted to this case by the Crown Prosecution Service in February. The commission said that the classified evidence that emerged was extremely sensitive and that it could not be released to the men’s solicitors, but that “raises a real possibility that the Court of Appeal would quash the conspiracy to murder convictions”. This is not the first of the serious failings in disclosure of evidence that have led to the collapse of trials. Such classified evidence emerged during another retrial of a case handled by the same solicitors. Charter said the trials had “cost the taxpayer in excess of a million pounds”. It added, “If the police are unchallenged in setting up an individual that they believe to be guilty in the pursuit of justice, where is the justice?”
The Prosecutors may seek to have the convictions substituted with conspiracy to inflict grievous bodily harm, instead of opposing quashing the convictions. The men’s lawyers said this would be of “extreme concern”.
