Murder victim’s son says Met chief must quit
MURDERED private eye Daniel Morgan’s son yesterday called for Met Police chief Cressida Dick to consider her position as he branded the force’s handling of investigations into his father’s death a “national shame”.
Mr Morgan’s son, also named Daniel, spoke publicly for the first time about the case after the publication of a damning independent panel report that accused the Met of “a form of institutional corruption” for concealing or denying failings over the unsolved murder for 34 years.
Daniel was just four when his father was killed by an axe to the head in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south-east London, in March 1987. Despite five police inquiries no one has been brought to justice, with the force admitting police corruption played a part in the original probe.
A panel spent eight years investigating the handling of the case and published a highly critical 1,251-page report on Tuesday.
It said the initial investigation was botched, with the crime scene unguarded and not properly searched, and evidence suspects “may have been alerted”.
It said the force failed to get to the bottom of what went wrong through a series of probes which ended when a trial against five suspects collapsed in 2011 and there is now no reasonable prospect of a successful prosecution.
The force has “unreservedly” apologised and launched a fresh appeal for information with a £50,000 reward, but denied allegations of institutional corruption and Ms Dick said she had no need to consider resigning.
Mr Morgan said: “It’s a personal tragedy for us and a national shame.
“I think we’ve heard enough apologies. I think the commissioner should consider her position. A lot of this happened way before she was ever the commissioner but she is a continuation of the same culture.
“The culture of the Metropolitan
Police is cancerous and I think the only way that you get rid of cancer is you cut it out.”
Former Met detectives have called for an independent inquiry into a series of unsolved gangland murders tainted by allegations of police corruption.
Former Met DCI Dave Mckelvey, who investigated some of London’s biggest crime networks until 2010, said: “There absolutely needs to be an independent review of all Met Police murder cases where corruption is believed to have compromised the investigation.”
He runs private investigation firm TM Eye, which is looking into a number of cases where killers evaded justice or it is thought the wrong person was jailed following alleged police corruption.
TM Eye is probing the unsolved murder of Selhouk Behdjet, stabbed to death in his north London flat in 1994. After a cold case review, a man was charged in 2012 with the murder, after his blood was found at the scene.
But the prosecution collapsed in 2014 after an investigation by the Met Police Department for Professional Standards concluded “the integrity of the crime scene could not be guaranteed”. Details of alleged corruption were contained in a secret Met Police report leaked to the media the year the case collapsed.
The classified Operation Tiberius was commissioned in 2002 to look at corruption linked to organised crime networks. The report identified at least five investigations allegedly compromised by detectives leaking information to suspects.
They include the case of Richard Rayner, 43, a plumber shot dead in an East End cafe in May 2001 in a case of mistaken identity. Investigations into the murders of Patrick Pasipanodya, 29, killed in Edmonton, North London, in August 2001, and Kenneth Beagle, 55, who was shot dead at a hospital car park in Romford, Essex, in 2000, were also said to have been compromised by leaks.
Another case was Michael Olymbious, shot dead in South London in 1995 after police seized £1.5million of ecstasy pills allegedly owned by the Adams crime gang. A witness statement for the prosecution was found in the flat above their nightclub.
Met Assistant Commissioner Nick Ephgrave said: “Because Operation Tiberius is classified, I am not able to discuss it. But all unsolved cases are subject to periodic review.”