A gripping insight into murder, drugs and bias
Last year, in the early hours of September 13, a young man, 19-year-old Suhaib Mohammed, was shot in the chest through a downstairs window in Milton Keynes. Less than two hours later, he was pronounced dead and a murder investigation was launched.
Catching a Killer: A Bullet Through the Window (Channel 4) gave us total access to this investigation. As the detectives, led by soon-to-be-retired Senior Investigating Officer Mike Lynch, tried to piece together a case, we saw suspects being interviewed, key bits of CCTV footage, and houses pulled apart by the forensics team. It felt almost voyeuristic to watch as a section of ceiling at one suspect’s house was intricately dismantled to reveal a vital piece of evidence.
There were twists and turns, as the two suspects – Mohamed Noor, 33, and Albert Prempeh, 35 – had their statements picked apart. This, then, was breathless, gripping stuff.
And yet, at the time, the case barely caused a ripple in the media. The reason for this was simple and depressing. Mohammed was associated with drug dealers. “The moment anybody linked our victim to the drugs supply world, there [was] no real story,” explained Lynch. “It [becomes] just another drug-fuelled murder.”
The great triumph of A Bullet Through the Window was in showing us what a callous attitude that is. Mohammed was an impressionable young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Courageously, Lynch likened the recruitment of young people into the drugs trade to grooming in the sex trade. It is a point of view that warrants more exposure.
Unlike in other true-crime programmes, such as Making a Murderer, this particular case didn’t have any of those gruesome elements that so titillate us. But A Bullet Through the Window proved that the killing of a bright young man should never be considered unremarkable. What a damning indictment of our society that drugs-related murders are now so commonplace as to be met with a dismissive shrug. It is a shameful state of affairs, which this programme quite brilliantly forced us to confront.
Catching a Killer: A Bullet Through the Window