Tag Archives: Serious and Organised Crime Agency
Fresh evidence that could have cleared the ‘Cocaine Crew’ of £53m smuggling plot is REJECTED
Five men serving prison terms of up to 24 years for a £53 million drug smuggling plot have lost their bid to appeal – despite fresh scientific evidence suggesting the version of events presented by the prosecution at the trial was ‘impossible’. Almost four years after The Mail on Sunday published the first of three investigations casting doubt on the convictions, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which has the power to refer possible miscarriages of justice to the Court of Appeal, has decided to take no action. In doing so, it is rejecting expert evidence that the fishing boat reputedly used to pick up holdalls packed with cocaine from the English Channel never actually reached the spot where the bags might have been dumped. click here to read the story 10:31
BASTARDS! Police doctored GPS data which saw fishing boat crew jailed for drug bust
A police electronics expert made a clumsy attempt to ‘doctor’ vital evidence that led to the conviction of four fishermen and their friend for drug smuggling, according to legal documents seen by this newspaper. The five men were accused of picking up rucksacks containing 560 lb of cocaine worth £53 million in the middle of the English Channel, before dropping them overboard off the south coast of the Isle of Wight for someone else to recover. At their trial, data from the satellite tracking device on their boat, the Galwad-y-Mor, appeared to damn them. But new evidence shows that after officers from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca) seized the vessel’s Olex GPS machine, an officer tried to alter internal databases, apparently to make them conform more closely to the prosecution’s theory. And in another bombshell development, it can be revealed that the Galwad-y-Mor could not have dumped the drugs at the location alleged by prosecutors, because the water there is too shallow and the vessel would have run aground. Read the story here 10:21
