Police facing a new probe over Lawrence ‘sabotage’
A MAJOR new investigation has been launched into claims that corrupt police officers sabotaged the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry.
The National Crime Agency – dubbed Britain’s ‘ FBI’ – is l eading the probe into allegations that ‘ bent’ Metropolitan Police detectives helped shield his racist white killers.
In April 1993, the 18-year- old aspiring architect was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack at a bus stop in Eltham, south-east London, by a gang of white youths.
The probe will investigate claims that former detective sergeant John Davidson, a key officer in the botched murder investigation, had a corrupt relationship with the gangster father of one of Stephen’s killers and stalled the inquiry.
Not until 2012 were two of his killers convicted, and only then after a long campaign led by this newspaper to bring them to justice.
In February 1997, under the headline Murderers, the Daily Mail accused five men of killing Stephen.
His parents, Doreen and Neville, have long been convinced that corrupt officers conspired to help thwart the hunt for the killers. The Met officially denies this.
The latest investigation, overseen by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, was prompted by the findings of a review last year which named Davidson. Stephen’s mother, now Baroness Lawrence, said: ‘We still believe that corruption played a part i n keeping Stephen’s killers free.
‘We have had to fight to get this far. Police corruption has denied us, and others, justice.
‘We ask those that have any information, be they former police offic- ers or criminals, to come forward, so justice can be done.’
The new i nquiry, which was revealed by the Mail last year, comes 22 years after the murder of Stephen, whose f amily were church-going model citizens.
Many local residents named the killers in the days after the stabbing, but police failed to arrest them for two weeks and their investigation was marked by a string of errors. Scotland Yard referred a file on Davidson to the IPCC last year after a damning official report raised questions about his conduct in the days after Stephen’s murder. He has always denied the allegations and any wrongdoing.
Barrister Mark Ellison’s review of the Lawrence case found that Davidson may have acted corruptly. It was claimed he had admitted having a ‘corrupt connection’ with David Norris’s gangland boss father Clifford. David Norris was finally convicted of Stephen’s murder in 2012 alongside Gary Dobson.
Since the report was published, a series of Daily Mail investigations has exposed a web of suspected corruption in the Scotland Yard i nquiries i nto the stabbing of Stephen and the axe killing of private investigator Daniel Morgan in March 1987.
Mr Morgan, 37, a father of two, was killed while allegedly trying to blow the whistle on police corruption. No one has yet been convicted in spite of five police investigations and admissions by the Met that corruption played a part in those failings.
It is believed that as well as working on the original Lawrence investigation, Davidson worked on the ‘ periphery’ of the Morgan murder inquiry. He now runs a bar on Minorca.