Daughter ‘tried to kill JP with rare poison from Peruvian plant’
A SUSPECTED plot to kill a magistrate with a rare poison extracted from the seeds of a Peruvian plant has been uncovered by police.
Detectives believe Meena Patel, 54, was the target of an unprecedented attack with abrin, a substance described as ‘more poisonous than ricin’.
Her daughter Kuntal, 36, is accused of spiking her Diet Coke with the toxin after allegedly buying it from an underworld website based in the US.
The alleged intended victim, who sits on the bench at Thames Magistrates Court, apparently drank the substance at her home in Stratford, East London, but survived.
Abrin is derived from the distinctive red seeds of the rosary pea plant, a sub-tropical perennial commonly found in Peru. It strikes at the liver, stomach and kidneys, and leads to vomiting, seizures and an agonising death within 72 hours.
Experts say a dose as small as three millionths of a gram can kill if it
Finger-tip search of their home
enters the bloodstream. There is no known antidote.
Kuntal Patel, who works for Barclays at its headquarters in Canary Wharf, appeared before Westminster Magistrates’ Court yesterday accused of attempted murder.
She was arrested by detectives from Scotland Yard’s counter terrorism command during a huge search operation last weekend. They were acting on a tip-off from the US Department of Homeland Security which smashed a hidden website that specialised in selling lethal toxins.
Dozens of officers subjected the Stratford home she shared with her mother to a finger-tip search as part of the investigation. They also combed the back garden, neighbours’ bins and a nearby skip, and seized Meena Patel’s white Nissan Micra.
Kuntal Patel, wearing a blue Hello Kitty sweatshirt with a pigtail hanging down her back, was told she does not face any terrorist charges yesterday. Instead she is accused of attempted murder between December and January 26. District Judge Jeremy Coleman refused an application for bail and sent her case to the Old Bailey for a hearing next month.
In a separate development, it emerged that a senior diplomat became embroiled in the search after his son signed for a package which police believed contained the poison.
James Sutcliffe, 19, was arrested under counter terrorism laws after it is believed that he innocently accepted the parcel for his neighbour.
Investigators are examining the possibility that the package was delivered to someone who lives next door to him in Streatham Hill, South London.
Mr Sutcliffe’s decision to accept the package is believed to have led police to spend four days searching the £650,000 family home he shares with his father Nicholas, a first secretary to the Foreign Office.
Neighbours looked on as specialist officers wearing protective equipment and breathing apparatus entered the property and sealed off the road.
They spent four days scouring the property and digging up the garden, using arc lights and tents so they could work around the clock.
James Sutcliffe was questioned for several hours on Saturday before being released on bail. On Wednesday he was told there would be no further police action.
None of his neighbours, the Wong family, was arrested although their house and garden were also searched.
A Sutcliffe family friend said: ‘They now want to get back to normal. James is very relieved that he has been totally cleared by the police – he knew all along he was innocent.’
There is not believed to be a single recorded murder in which abrin was used, but it has appeared in fiction. Kathy Reichs includes a detailed account of the poison as a weapon in her 2011 novel Flash And Bones.