Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
MURIEL MCKAY CASE COULD HOLD KEY TO BRIT IN NARCOS HIT
Fingerprint could free OAP ‘framed for Escobar murder’
FINGERPRINTS found in the Muriel McKay murder files could free a British OAP who says he was framed for killings carried out by Pablo Escobar’s hitmen.
Kris Maharaj, 85, has spent 38 years in jail in the US for shooting a dad and son said to have stolen laundered money from the drug kingpin.
Now lawyer Clive Stafford Smith believes Kris was stitched up by a friend who pulled the trigger in a Miami hotel room in 1986.
The same man – Adam Hosein – was questioned by UK police in 1969 over Muriel’s murder but fled the country soon after.
The Trinidadian criminal had lived near Muriel at the time kidnappers snatched her from her London home after mistaking her for the wife of tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Hosein’s two brothers Nizamodeen and Arthur were jailed for life for her kidnap and murder but her body has never been found.
COCAINE
The case was back in the headlines last month when police carried out another dig at the Hertfordshire farm where she was held hostage.
Now Clive wants the fingerprints police took from Hosein in 1969 compared with unidentified ones found at the scene of the Miami murders 17 years later.
He said: “The idea that Adam Hosein may have got away with murder in Britain and then got away with another murder in America – in between all his drug dealing, and resulting in Kris going to death row and spending 38 years in prison – is absolutely shocking.”
Hosein, now dead, ran front companies for Escobar – portrayed in Netflix hit Narcos – in the 1980s.
In 1986, at the height of Miami’s cocaine wars, Derrick Moo Young and his son Duane were shot dead in room 1215 of the city’s DuPont Plaza Hotel.
Hotel records show a message was left for Hosein at room 1215 on the same day.
One witness placed him at the crime scene that day and said he came into $2,000 and cocaine at the same time.
George Abchal, who ran a garage in Miami for Hosein, said he drove with him to the Moo Youngs’ home days earlier.
He says Hosein had gone to buy cocaine but did not have the cash and already owed them.
The Jamaican-Chinese pair allegedly threw him out.
George, who was never called to testify, said a gun and silencer kept in Hosein’s drawer vanished around the time of the murders.
Questioned by US investigators, Hosein denied having any business dealings
with the Moo Youngs. But after Kris was jailed he went to Panama and transferred control of
their money laundering operation to himself. Prosecutors claimed Kris killed the Moo Youngs because they owed him money.
The self-made millionaire, from Peckham, south-east London, had been running a fruit import operation in Miami when he was arrested.
Kris spent 15 years on Death Row and was only spared the electric chair thanks to Clive, a British human rights lawyer and founder of the charity Reprieve. Clive went to the Colombian home of Escobar’s cartel, Medellin, and found six witnesses who testified that the late drug lord had ordered the killings because the Moo Youngs were siphoning off drugs money.
Clive said of Hosein: “To find physical proof that he was involved in the murder of the Moo Youngs would surely be the nail in the coffin of the United States’ efforts to keep tormenting Kris.”
Kris is in poor health and more
than 100 UK MPs have called for his release but US courts have rejected all his appeals.
Kris’s wife Marita, 84, who now lives in England, said: “Adam Hosein was supposed to be a good friend of Kris but I didn’t like him. All he wanted from Kris was his money.”
Marita said that around a week before the murders her husband refused him cash and he said that he was “going to regret it”.