The Scottish miscarriage of justice watchdog has agreed to take a fresh look at the controversial case of a man who has protested his innocence of a notorious 1994 murder of a Bangladeshi waiter in the Orkneys.  Michael Ross told the The Orcadian  it was ‘great news’ that a full review is to be launched into his murder conviction. The paper’s reporter Ethan Flett has been investigating concerns about the safety of Ross’s conviction – see here.

The case is known locally as the Mumtaz murder – Shamsuddin Mahmood was killed at the Mumtaz Indian restaurant in Kirkwall by a balaclava-wearing gunman. Ross is presently serving a life sentence having been convicted of the killing in 2008. In the summer, Ross made an application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC).

’It is great news that the SCCRC have agreed to review my case,’ Ross told The Orcadian. ‘I have been working towards this for a long time. The SCCRC will be looking at several grounds that have been found by the intensive and hard work of my campaign group, with the intent of taking the case to the appeal court and hopefully quashing my conviction.’

The former Black Watch sergeant previously had his case rejected by the appeal court in 2012, and by the SCCRC during an earlier review which concluded in 2015.

According to the latest Orcadian report by Flett, the Justice 4 Michael Ross (J4MR) campaign hopes that SCCRC will review police notebooks and takes a detailed look at when Ross became a suspect for the killing’. ‘We firmly believe that the evidence that convicted Michael was gained using underhand tactics and that Michael, as a child of 16, had the right to be protected from self-incrimination and police oppression,’ a campaign spokeswoman said.  ‘Aside from the tragedy of the devastation to Michael and his family from this miscarriage of justice, our community has been irreparably damaged and there is significant and growing public mistrust in the methods used to achieve a murder conviction in this case.’