Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
‘Nanny killers burned body on a bonfire’
European Court rejects request by Irish government to revise 1978 ruling
A COUPLE murdered their nanny and threw her on a bonfire in their garden as they barbecued chicken nearby, a court heard.
Sabrina Kouider, 35, and Ouissem Medouni, 40, had allegedly tortured Sophie Lionnet for weeks.
Firefighters discovered the 21-year-old’s charred remains last September.
Prosecutor Richard Horwell QC said: “Medouni was asked what it was and he replied: ‘It’s a sheep’.”
Jurors have heard Kouider was obsessed with the false idea Miss Lionnet was in league with her ex, Boyzone star Mark Walton.
Kouider and Medouni, of Wimbledon, South West London, deny murder but admit perverting the course of justice by burning the body. The Old Bailey trial continues. THE European Court of Human Rights has given countries the “green light” to torture, the Hooded Men claimed yesterday.
They hit out after a request by the Republic to rule they had suffered torture at the hands of the British Army during the Troubles was rejected in Strasbourg.
Dismissing the case by six votes to one, the court said there was “no justification” to revise a 1978 ruling which found the men’s treatment was inhumane and degrading, but not torture.
It added new evidence had not demonstrated the existence of facts that were not known to the court at the time or which could have had a decisive influence on the original judgment.
The so-called Hooded Men were 14 Catholics interned without trial in 1971 who said they were subjected to a number of torture methods.
The group’s case co-ordinator Jim Mcilmurray told the Mirror they would be calling on the Irish government to appeal yesterday’s ruling to the court’s grand chamber.
He added: “The judgment was something of a surprise considering the volume of evidence we submitted to them.
“We are dismayed with the judgement and I feel it is a bad day for justice.
“The ECHR had an opportunity to end world torture, but this judgment basically gives a green light to those countries that wish to employ these barbaric methods comfortably in the knowledge they can hide behind ‘inhumane and degrading treatment’.”
Techniques used against the men included hooding, stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and lack of food and water, along with beatings and death threats. The men were hooded and flown to a secret location, later revealed as a British Army camp at Ballykelly, outside Derry.
They were also dangled out of the helicopter and told they were high in the air, although they were close to the ground. None were ever convicted of wrongdoing.
KRW Law, who represented the men, said the ECHR ruling “ran counter to the UK’S own admission in the case that the techniques used on the Hooded Men amounted to torture”.
It referenced a claim made by
Merlyn Rees in a memo
BELFAST YESTERDAY
discovered by RTE in 2014 in the UK national archive.
It found that in 1977 Mr Rees, then home secretary, sent a letter to Prime Minister James Callaghan setting out his views on procedures deployed against the group.
In the correspondence Mr Rees said it was his view “the decision to use methods of torture in Northern Ireland in 1971/72 was taken by ministers – in particular Lord Carrington, then secretary of state for defence”.
The Irish government first took a human rights case against Britain over the alleged torture in 1971.
The European Commission of Human Rights ruled the mistreatment of the men was torture, but in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights held they had suffered inhumane and degrading treatment that was not torture. The UK did not dispute the finding.
But following the discovery of the new evidence from the national archives, and amid pressure from Amnesty International and other human rights organisations, Ireland launched fresh legal proceedings in December 2014.