Dorset Police have been accused of ‘framing’ Omar Benguit and manufacturing the evidence that has kept him in prison for 23 years for the murder of a South Korean student. According to a BBC Panorama investigation broadcast tonight and now available on iPlayer by the journalist Bronagh Munro, 15 witnesses used to support the prosecution case have now told the BBC that the police pressured them to embellish statements or lie in court in their investigation into the brutal murder of Jong-Ok Shin known as Oki.
- The case of Omar Benguit has featured extensively on the Justice Gap and in Jon’s book Guilty Until Proven Innocent (Biteback, 2018)
Tonight’s Panorama is the third time that Bronagh Monro has returned to the story – the first investigation was called The Man with no Alibi. Her latest investigation reveals that he might well have had an alibi all along – and that Dorset police might have ‘buried it’: CCTV footage of Benguit using a phone box about 25 minutes after the murder. Oki was stabbed to death while walking home from a nightclub in 2002. Benguit, a former problematic heroin user convicted, was convicted as the result of testimony of the main prosecution witness, a drug user and prostitute known as ‘BB’, bolstered by circumstantial evidence of 13 drug addicts, all well known to the local police. They attested to Benguit’s guilty-looking behaviour immediately after Oki’s death. There was no CCTV nor forensic evidence linking to Benguit to the murder.
On BB’s account, Omar Benguit plus two other men alleged to have been involved in the attack were supposed to been at the crack house in the aftermath of the killing that they, together with nearly all the prosecution witnesses, frequented. According to Panorama, if the man in the footage is Benguit then he cannot have been at the crack house as claimed by BB.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which has had the latest application for five years, has already agreed that it is possible that the man in the footage was Benguit; but Panorama has now uncovered phone records backing up the fact that it was him in the phone box. A call was made from the phone box to Benguit’s dealer at the time that the man who looks like him was captured on CCTV.
The CCRC has found that 135 CCTV tapes from the original police investigation had gone missing. Panorama also claims that the police were aware of this potential alibi but appeared to have ‘buried it’. ‘The police were highly selective in the way they collected evidence. In my opinion, Omar was framed. This was a quite elaborate frame-up,’ criminologist Professor Barry Loveday, who has been researching the case for 20 years.
According to Panorama, the evidence of a total of now 15 key prosecution witnesses has now been ‘discredited or undermined’ (see here). One witness, Andi Miller, told the BBC that ‘BB’ informed the police about dozens of thefts they had committed together and pressured him to say he had seen Benguit on the night of Oki’s killing covered in blood. ‘They had me bang to rights on jobs, you know what I mean?’ he said. ‘And I never got charged for any of it. I felt as though the police pressurised me into saying something that wasn’t true.’
Of the three suspects identified by BB as involved in the murder, one was a drug dealer who was never charged and deported to Jamaica never to be heard of again and the third, Nick Gbadamosi, was acquitted at the 2004 retrial after he was caught on CCTV standing at a phonebox shortly after the murder thus undermining BB’s evidence. ‘I will always be the guy that was arrested for murder,’ Gbadamosi told the BBC. ‘I’ll always be the guy that was arrested for rape. That was all done by old bill who knew from the beginning it wasn’t us. They knew it wasn’t me an they knew it wasn’t Omar. The poor man is rotting away in prison for something that he didn’t do.’
A Dorset Police spokesperson told the BBC: ‘This case has been through a series of reviews and any matter surrounding concerns regarding this conviction is ultimately a matter for the CCRC and the Court of Appeal.’ It said it would ‘instigate investigations if directed by the courts and responsible authorities’, adding: ‘As always, our thoughts are with Oki’s family and friends who remain devastated by their loss.’
