by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (March 14th 2013)

A Beast in Uniform

The death penalty is the ultimate deterrent, or so we keep hearing. Really? Then how do its supporters explain the actions and fate of former Casablanca police commissioner Mohamed Mustafa Tabet? On August 8th 1993 the 54-year-old serial rapist faced a firing squad. He was believed to have claimed almost 520 victims – some of whom were schoolgirls. Tabet had been convicted at an extraordinary trial five months earlier – one that laid bare a web of corrupt abuse of police and medical powers.

His crimes were despicable and only emerged because of the courage of some victims who demanded justice. Tabet’s downfall was self-inflicted – the price of incredible arrogance and belief in his privilege. Not only had the vile police commissioner committed a plethora of unspeakable crimes, but he had also video-taped the ordeals of his numerous victims secretly and kept the tapes.

Tabet’s video-tapes were discovered by investigators – 118 of them – documenting his bestial crimes in an apartment he kept for committing his sex crimes. They were recorded by concealed cameras, which Tabet had installed.
The sensational month-long trial disgraced Moroccan policing. Eighteen victims gave evidence behind closed doors. Their accounts were similar. They had been taken to the apartment by force or ruse and then subjected to vile sexually cruel ordeals. They received damages between $3500-16,000.

Scandal

The scandal came to light because two of Tabet’s victims took legal action against him. Morocco, to its credit, did not cover up for Tabet, or his colleagues. Tabet – married to two women and father of five children – was a vicious beast. However, his defence stretched credibility to absurd lengths. He claimed that the sex was consensual – all 518. Not surprisingly he was not believed. But even worse emerged.

Tabet’s numerous crimes, committed over several years, were appalling. That cannot be disputed, but how had he evaded justice for so long? The answer lies in colleagues who disgraced their profession and a gynaecologist who performed unwanted abortions and reconstructed hymens. Dr Driss Lahlou received 17 years. His crimes also included complicity in rape.

The Cover-Up

The cover-up was extensive and shameful. It involved civilians – five of whom were jailed for ten years. Eight police officers were sent to prison for three years. They were not alone. Police Commissioners Abdesalam Bekkali and Mustafa Benmaghnia obstructed justice and failed to denounce a crime. They were jailed for twenty and ten years respectively for these offences and for falsification.

However, the worst of the conspirators of silence was Tabet’s superior, Ahmed Ouachi. He was sentenced to life imprisonment – and rightly so – for trying to cover up Tabet’s crimes both before and during the investigation that finally exposed Tabet for the depraved beast that he was. The list of Tabet’s offences were legion.

Deterrence?

If capital punishment was the deterrent it is claimed to be, how did it fail to curb the criminal instincts of Mohamed Mustafa Tabet, a commissioner of police? Surely Tabet knew the consequences of his crimes and the risk of committing them, but that could not deter a senior police officer from committing heinous offences.

Tabet’s execution was the last to take place in Morocco, despite two terrorist atrocities – suicide bombings in 2003 and 2007. Despite Morocco retaining the death penalty – over a hundred prisoners remain under sentence of death – it has not carried out an execution for almost a quarter of a century and is considered a de facto abolition nation.

Suspicions

Before police investigating the rape and murder of Nienke Kleiss and attempted murder of Maikel Willebrand ‘discovered’ Kees Borsboom as a suspect, they believed that Willebrand was lying. The children had been playing in Beatrix Park in Schiedam. They were viciously attacked by a man. Kleiss tried to fight back, but the ten-year-old girl was no match for a homicidal Wik Haalmeijer.

Nor was the eleven-year-old Willebrand. He played dead and waited for Haalmeijer to go. Eventually he did and Willebrand sought help, which he received from passing cyclist Kees Borsboom – the man who called the police. The police did not believe Willebrand. The survivor – the crucial witness – was treated as their prime suspect. They thought that he had been too smart by playing dead.

His account did not fit the case-scenario that they had developed – a ridiculous one – so they thought that he was the perpetrator. It was absurd on every level. Willebrand was a child. There was no evidence that he had attacked his friend and there was clear scientific evidence that proved that someone else had been involved.

It was even thought by police that his injuries were self-inflicted. But then a coincidence occurred. Police discovered that their star witness Borsboom had exposed himself to a child – the child of a police officer. They decided that could not be coincidence. He becomes their prime suspect, but it was exactly that – a coincidence – a wretched one at that.

Miracle

The survivor was to all intents and purposes a defence witness, but Willebrand was marginalised. The surviving victim and therefore a key witness did not support the case hypothesis. Rather than admit that the hypothesis was the nonsense that it was subsequently proved to be, the victim/witness was marginalised and Borsboom was convicted in nearby Rotterdam.

Borsboom subsequently lost his appeal, but this was not the end of the story. Despite the indisputable evidence of innocence, he could have maintained his innocence to his dying day without being believed. It required a miracle and unusually it got one.

Both he and Willebrand would be vindicated by it. Wik Haalmeijer was arrested for two unconnected rapes. He not only admitted to those offences, but confessed to the Schiedammer Park crimes and insisted on DNA tests to prove his guilt. Nothing would induce him to withdraw his request. The DNA testing proved his guilt and also Borsboom’s innocence.

Unconscionable

The Dutch criminal justice has a good reputation abroad. Even activists, when told about the now notorious Lynette White Inquiry as the battle to free the Cardiff Three was nearing its conclusion in 1992, defended it. They said that it was impossible for justice to miscarry in the Netherlands as badly as it had in the Lynette White Inquiry for example.

Their outrage was limited to a peace activist who had been sentenced to two weeks imprisonment for daubing graffiti in an American base after breaking into it. They insisted that this was sentencing him twice for the same crime and they were outraged about it.

This, they insisted, was the worst miscarriage of justice in the Netherlands at that time. But they were wrong. The Dutch system was capable of miscarrying as badly as it had in Britain – worse even.

Vicious

On June 22^nd 2000 ten-year-old Nienke Kleiss was raped and murdered in Beatrix Park in the small town of Schiedam, which is within easy commuting distance of Rotterdam. She fought hard for her life and left vital clues to identify the perpetrator, but her efforts were wasted by police and the Dutch criminal justice system for four years as justice miscarried twice.

Her eleven-year-old friend, Maikel Willebrand, with whom she had been playing, was also viciously stabbed at the same time by Wik Haalmeijer. Willebrand survived by playing dead only to be absurdly accused of having inflicted the injuries on himself to cover up his crime – the attack on Kleiss. It was an utterly ludicrous allegation and an unconscionable way to treat a child who had been the victim of a vicious attack.

DNA testing would play a large part in this inquiry. It quickly proved that Willebrand had been telling the truth that he had been attacked himself and had played no part in the rape or murder of Kleiss, but police were still not prepared to listen to him at all.

They only moved on from Willebrand when they heard about a coincidence regarding the man who then became their new prime suspect Kees Borsboom – the man who had helped Willebrand after the crimes by reporting it to the police. And even then they would not accept Willebrand’s account because the boy would not turn on the man who had helped him.

Fanciful

DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom, then working for the Netherlands Forensic Institute (FSI) developed the DNA protocols that were used in the Schiedammer Park case. He knew that Low Template DNA had produced important results, quickly realising that both Willebrand and Borsboom had nothing to do with the crimes, but he was not the Reporting Officer and Ate Kloosterman’s report was very selective.

Kloosterman told the judge that the ‘foreign’ DNA results on Kleiss’ shoe and fingernails had been deposited by a child at her school. Unknown to the court there were compelling reasons to reject that explanation. Kleiss had been playing in water just before she was attacked and the surviving victim had told police that she had scratched her assailant – time would tell that she had.

The results on the shoe and elsewhere were also the same – it would have required an incredible coincidence for all of those alleles to have been deposited at various locations innocently, but Kloosterman knew the significance of the results well or should have done. It was obvious that they had been deposited by one person and not by Kleiss’ classmates. They had the DNA of the real perpetrator – enough to eliminate the entirely innocent Borsboom, but selective disclosure prevented that from happening.

Institutional Racism

Over 20 months before black aspiring architect Stephen Lawrence was murdered, the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had the opportunity to save his life, but institutional racism prevented it. 15-year-old Rolan Adams was brutally murdered on February 21^st 1991. His then 14-year-old brother Nathan escaped the killers. By the time he returned – it was before everyone carried mobile phones – Rolan was dead. His carotid artery had been cut.

A group of 15 racist thugs who had been involved in racist attacks before and since were responsible. They hurled ugly racist abuse at the two boys who had just been waiting for a bus and attacked them. Mark Thornburrow was the only one of them convicted of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 10 years in jail. Despite that over 20 years after losing his son Rolan’s father, Richard, still feels betrayed.

Connived

“They connived to remove the racist element from the murder,” an angry Richard Adams said at the time. “We knew that we would not get justice when they started saying that territorialism rather than racism was the main motivation for the murder”.

Both police and CPS saw it as a triumph as Mark Thornburrow was jailed for life for the murder of 15-year-old Rolan Adams, but 15 racist youths attacked Rolan and his then 14-year-old brother Nathan, who survived the attack. Only 7 of the gang who had racially abused and attacked other black youths on the Thamesmead estate, were charged and that was reduced to 4, and only 3 eventually got 120 hours community service for violent disorder.

Fostering a Knife Culture

“The others are as guilty as Thornburrow”, Mr Adams told me. “My sons could not defend themselves from all of them. They should have been charged with murder by joint enterprise. If the police and CPS had done that my son’s murder might have been the last in the Borough of Greenwich instead of the first of three racist murders”.

Justice has finally taken its course in the notorious case of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, but the ordeal of the Richard and Nathan Adams and their family continues. It could and should have prevented the murders of Rohit Duggal and later Stephen Lawrence and many other knife-crimes too.

Cowardly

Mr Adams is dissatisfied with Thornburrow’s tariff. “10 years for the cowardly murder of my son is not enough,” said Mr Adams. “The judge acknowledged that it was racist and he carried and used a knife. What kind of deterrence is that? If Thornburrow had received the sentence he deserved, the knife-carrying culture that followed could have been stopped in its tracks. He should have been charged with the attempted murder of Nathan as well, which should have increased the tariff. The Lord Chief Justice could have increased his tariff and so could the Home Secretary at that time. Why didn’t they”?

Victimsʼ Rights

Their lives were torn apart by Rolan’s murder  a crime that should have been the pivotal moment in race relations in Britain. Mr Adams believes that the actions of the criminal justice system not only made their ordeal worse, but left other families vulnerable too.

“I have no doubt that institutional racism played a major part not just in the failure to give us justice, but encouraging the racists”, Mr Adams said. “We wanted victim’s rights back then, but we were left to fend for ourselves. The thugs hurled racist abuse at my sons before attacking them because they were black. They did nothing wrong. If the police and CPS had done their jobs properly, Rolan’s murder would have been seen as the racist crime it was and the families of Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence would not have faced that same racism by a system that should have known better”.

Failed Miserably

Witnesses, including Nathan, testified that it was a racist attack and the judge was satisfied that they were right. “The CPS should not have relied on the police alone”, said Mr Adams. “The police had a racist view that this was not a racist murder. They were wrong and they made a terrible ordeal for us even worse. The CPS should have relied on the witnesses. They were there and they knew it was racist. When the judge agreed with us that the thugs who attacked my sons were racist, the police and CPS should have agreed to an independent judicial inquiry to find out why we were failed so miserably. That could have prevented other tragedies”.

Richard and Nathan and their family suffered a terrible ordeal. Nathan turned his back on a promising career in football. He went off the rails as a result of that terrible February night. He has got back on track without any help from the authorities.

“The police and CPS should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves”, said Mr Adams. “Not only did they fail us miserably in the prosecution, but they gave us no support either. Nathan especially really needed help. It took us many years to recover and ensure that Rolan has the fitting legacy he deserves.”

Legacy

They have established the Rolan Adams Legacy Trust to make sure that this important story in Britain’s race relations is never forgotten. They also want justice for both Rolan and Nathan. “Thornburrow got a minimum recommendation of 10 years, but he eventually served only 13”, said Mr Adams. “Why? It was a cowardly racist murder and he claimed he acted in self-defence. 15 against 2 and he had a knife as well and he is allowed to get out too soon”. His thoughts on that are understandably unprintable.

He has no doubt that institutional racism robbed his family of justice and that if the CPS had prosecuted the others through joint enterprise it would have sent a message to others not to encourage racist attacks and even restrain knife-wielding thugs like Thornburrow. He thinks that had those lessons been learned early enough, Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence among others might still be alive. But he wants more – a legacy for Rolan and the justice he and his family were denied 20 years ago.

“There have been fantastic advances in forensic science in the last 20 years”, said Mr Adams. “The police and CPS have a chance to redeem themselves by investigating Rolan’s murder and the attempted murder of Nathan properly through modern investigative methods and forensic science. Both Rolan and Nathan are entitled to justice even if it is 20 years later than it should have been”.