Nine more Grenfell fraud suspects held
Con artists ‘took £500,000 put aside for fire survivors’
THE Grenfell Tower fraud probe widened yesterday with the arrest of nine more suspects accused of stealing up to £500,000 put aside for survivors.
Eight men and a woman were held in raids on 11 London addresses at 7am yesterday.
Some claimed they had lived in the tower and were arrested in hotel rooms they had stayed in for almost a year and paid for by Kensington and Chelsea Council.
One of the alleged fraudsters is said to have spent £100,000 from the Grenfell victims’ fund on hotels, fine dining, clothes and travel.
The other eight suspects are accused of claiming between £ 25,000 and £100,000 in public aid by pretending they lived in the tower.
In total, fraud detectives have opened at least 14 separate Grenfell investigations. Detective Superintendent Matt Bonner predicted more fraud arrests were likely.
He said the suspects had tried to ‘exploit’ genuine Grenfell survivors and their families, adding: ‘All those arrests are for what we believed to be fraudulent claims for housing and support of one kind of another, arising out of false claims from people that they were associated with Grenfell Tower.’
Police made the arrests after realising the suspects did not appear on CCTV footage recovered from the tower’s atrium.
Shahin Sadafi, a survivor of the disaster, said: ‘It is hurtful and saddening.’
Investigators at the council spent months checking the backgrounds of the latest suspects before passing dossiers to the police in March.
The council said that in some cases it believed a fraud was taking place months before the arrests, but continued to allow suspects to live in hotels to amass evidence, adding: ‘The onus is on the authority to prove that fraud has happened.’
Three fraudsters have already been jailed for claiming public funds and charitable donations by pretending to be survivors.
They include Joyce Msokeri, 47, who posed as a Grenfell survivor and falsely claimed to have lost her husband in the blaze so she could claim thousands in compensation and stay in a Hilton hotel.
The conwoman, from Zimbabwe, travelled 14 miles from her own flat to the smouldering tower and convinced charity workers she had survived the inferno. She feigned trauma to obtain handouts of £19,000 in cash, food, clothing and three mobile phones.
She would have received £203,000 in handouts if she had not been caught. Msokeri was jailed for four and a half years in April.
Vietnamese illegal immigrant Anh Nhu Nguyen, 53, was jailed for 21 months in February after pretending his wife and 12-year- old son were killed in the blaze so he could claim £11,270.
He was comforted by Prince Charles after claiming he lost them in a smoke-filled stairwell.
He was put up in hotels and given clothing, laptops and cash.
But after giving tearful TV interviews about his escape and the horror of climbing over dead bodies, it emerged that he was a convicted fraudster with 17 aliases who lived 12 miles away.
Business student Mohammad
‘It is hurtful and saddening’
Gamoota, who pretended to be the son of a Grenfell Tower victim so he could claim almost £7,000 and a free stay in a hotel, was jailed for 18 months last week.
Gamoota, 31, trawled through a list of the dead and then told council officials that his father was Abdeslam Sebbar, 77. But he was not related to Mr Sebbar and did not live in the tower.
Elaine Douglas and Tommy Brooks, who entered Britain illegally from Jamaica in 2002, falsely claimed they lived in the tower to claim more than £120,000.
They spent eight months in a four-star hotel, costing taxpayers £400 a night. They also spent more than £20,000 on pre-paid credit cards given to them by Kensington and Chelsea council.
Douglas, 51, and Brooks, 52, will be sentenced next month after admitting fraud.