There must be justice for WPc Fletcher

The murder of WPc Yvonne Fletcher in April 1984 took place in broad daylight, before dozens of witnesses, and with the perpetrator trapped within a building, and yet it remains unpunished to this day. WPc Fletcher was in St James’s Square, London, to monitor a demonstration against the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi, but was tragically killed by a bullet fired from the first floor of the Libyan embassy at the protesters.

The crime illustrated the callous brutality of the Gaddafi regime, its reckless disregard for life, and its belief that it could bring violence to these shores with impunity. Has the subsequent behaviour of the British authorities proved them wrong? Gaddafi’s tyranny is long gone, replaced by the endless chaos of the Libyan civil war, and yet still, all these years later, there has been no justice for WPc Fletcher.

Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk, a Gaddafi ally who had returned to the UK after Tony Blair normalised diplomatic relations with Libya, was arrested in November 2015 on suspicion of conspiracy to murder WPc Fletcher. He had not been in the embassy at the time, but a file compiled by prosecutors put Mabrouk at the heart of a plan to shoot at the protesters from the embassy.

The case against him was dropped in 2017 because there was “insufficient admissible evidence” to bring charges. Controversially, key evidence could not be put before a court on grounds of national security. It therefore fell to John Murray, a colleague of WPc Fletcher, to bring civil proceedings against Mabrouk in a last ditch attempt to discover the truth of what happened on that terrible day in 1984.

As we report today, however, that plan may have been thwarted by a decision of the UK Government. Astonishingly, in January 2019, with Mabrouk then conveniently back in Libya, the Home Office determined that he could not be re-admitted to Britain. Why was this decision made? Will nobody face justice for the murder of WPc Fletcher?

Her family, friends, and rank-and-file police officers are entitled to know.