Police will charge a man in the next few days with the murder of PC Keith Blakelock 28 years ago.
The suspect – a juvenile at the time of the killing which shocked Britain – was allegedly part of the mob who stabbed the officer to death during the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985.
Murdered: Police may finally be able to uncover the truth behind the 1985 killing of PC Keith Blakelock
The extraordinary development follows a marathon new inquiry into PC Blakelock’s death, one of the most controversial unsolved murders on Scotland Yard’s books.
A three-year review, which started in 2000, uncovered a number of leads and resulted in a major new investigation being launched in 2003.
Ten years later, the Metropolitan force is awaiting formal permission from the Crown Prosecution Service to put a suspect on trial.
He is believed to have been among the ‘stabbers and kickers’ who converged on the married father of three during the riot on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, North London.
The reinvestigation has cost taxpayers millions of pounds and spanned an incredible 13 years.
It was ordered by former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, who was determined that the policeman’s family should achieve justice for the appalling events at Broadwater Farm in 1985.
More than 6,000 statements were examined and the latest DNA techniques used to scrutinise evidence.
Police also used a ground-breaking virtual-reality video of the scene compiled from police and press photographs taken on the night.
Police and prosecutors are said to have been liaising over the evidence in the case for more than a year.
Detectives are said to have been mindful of recent ‘historic’ murder trials, such as the axe killing of private eye Daniel Morgan in 1987, which collapsed because of disputes over how evidence was originally gathered.
PC Blakelock, 40, was trying to protect firemen who were tackling a supermarket blaze at the height of the disturbance.
After stumbling, he was surrounded by a mob screaming: ‘Kill the pig’. He was knifed dozens of times and his machete-wielding killers then tried to decapitate him.
Winston Silcott, Mark Braithwaite and Engin Raghip were convicted of murder in March 1987 but all three convictions were quashed four and a half years later after forensic tests on pages of key interview records suggested they had been fabricated.
Aftermath: Police watch the devastation
following the riots in Tottenham, North London where a mob hacked PC
Blakelock to death on Broadwater Farm estate
Silcott accepted £50,000 compensation from the Home Office but remained in prison for an unrelated murder and was released in 2003.
None of the three men originally convicted is the new suspect. For legal reasons, the Mail is not naming the man who will be charged or disclosing his present circumstances.
It was revealed in October 2010 – on the 25th anniversary of PC Blakelock’s murder – that ten men had been arrested in London and Suffolk for questioning over the crime.
All were in their 40s or 50s and had lived in the Tottenham area at the time of the riot.
New forensic tests were carried out on PC Blakelock’s flame-retardant overalls, which for years had been on show to criminologists and trainee police officers at Scotland Yard’s so-called ‘Black Museum’ of police and criminal artefacts.
Scene: PC Blakelock was hacked to death by
dozens of men armed with everything from machetes to kitchen knives
during riots at Broadwater Farm estate, pictured in 2003, on October 6,
1985
The garment and more than a dozen murder weapons – several machetes and a kitchen knife – were analysed using updated DNA techniques.
Evidence gathered by the new multi-million-pound inquiry is believed to include significant fresh witness statements, rather than forensic evidence.
In relaunching the investigation, police chiefs had to consider the response of the black community in the volatile North London suburb of Haringey, which includes Broadwater Farm. They feared a backlash from race campaigners who supported Silcott when he was released from jail after serving 17 years for the separate murder.
Glen Smyth, former chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, welcomed the decision to put a new suspect on trial.
He told the Mail: ‘The brutal murder of Keith Blakelock shocked the Met to its core.
‘The attack on him was motivated by evil and hatred, and committed by people who have no regard for human life.’
THE WIDOW WHO WILL NEVER STOP GRIEVIN
In a rare public appearance in 2010, Mrs Blakelock, now 61, appealed on Crimewatch for witnesses to bring his suspected killers to justice.
The programme screened a reconstruction marking the 25th anniversary of the murder.
She said: ‘I know it was the uniform they were attacking that night, but there was a father and a husband inside that uniform and they killed him.’
She later added: ‘There’s never ever a day goes past when I do not think of Keith, and this has been hanging over us every day for the last 25 years.’
After her husband’s murder Mrs Blakelock and her three young sons Mark, Kevin and Lee moved back to her native village on the outskirts of Sunderland.
There she was comforted by her childhood friend David Johnson and they later married.
She said: ‘It is true to say without David’s strength I could not have endured all I have gone through.
'He has been a tower of strength. He has made me live again.’
Lee Blakelock, who was eight at the time of his father’s death, went on to become a police officer in Durham.
Stabbed 40 times by a baying 'pack of dogs' wielding machetes, bricks and iron bars
By Guy Adams
Unsolved: PC Keith Blakelock was brutally murdered by dozens of men while on duty 28 years ago
One witness said they looked like ‘vultures pecking at something on the ground’. Another likened them to a pack of dogs attacking their wounded prey.
Everyone who saw Keith Blakelock die at the hands of an angry mob during the Broadwater Farm riot agreed that his killers had behaved like wild animals.
The 40-year-old PC, a loving husband and father to three young sons, was hacked to death on Sunday, October 6, 1985, by 50 men carrying knives, machetes, bricks, bottles, swords and iron bars.
Blakelock’s attackers screamed ‘kill the pig!’ and ‘filth!’ after they saw him slip and fall while running from the scene of a fire on the council estate in Tottenham, North London.
In the ensuing violence, he suffered more than 40 stab wounds, along with deep lacerations to his face and neck.
A coroner decided that these must have come from an axe or machete during an attempted decapitation.
The Old Bailey was later told that the youths who carried out the attack, most of whom were wearing balaclavas and motorcycle helmets, had attempted to cut off Blakelock’s head so they could parade it around the estate on a pole.
‘They butchered Keith Blakelock and then they wanted to butcher me,’ said PC Richard Coombes, whose face was slashed by the same mob.
Blakelock’s injuries were ‘just horrific’, recalled Trevor Stratford, a 32-year-old fireman who was at the scene.
‘He had a knife embedded up to the handle in the back of his neck. We could see he had multiple stab wounds and some of his fingers were missing.’
When police officers finally managed to drag PC Blakelock from the scene, the 6in kitchen knife was still embedded in his neck and his fireproof overalls were drenched with blood. He died that night at North Middlesex Hospital.
It was a singularly repulsive murder, so savage that witnesses still shake at its memory. Yet in the 28 years since Keith Blakelock’s life was so horrifically cut short, it has also become a sad byword for the failure of our justice system.
In the days and weeks following the murder, the Metropolitan Police poured resources into solving the case. More than 400 of the roughly 3,500 residents of the drug-ridden estate were arrested and questioned about the attack.
Six of them – three minors and three adults – were charged in connection with his murder.
Unrest: A picture taken during the riots show a
group of young men clashing with police on the Broadwater Farm estate
during the 1985 upheaval
Yet already, the killing had been muddied by racial politics. It came, after all, at a time of mounting tension between Britain’s black community and the police.
That summer, riots had broken out in Brixton, South London, and Handsworth in the West Midlands.
The disturbances at Broadwater Farm, in which 220 people including 200 policemen were injured, were part of a volatile pattern.
The riots had been sparked by the death of Cynthia Jarrett, a black woman, during a police raid on her home the previous evening.
In Left-wing circles, many whispered that the riots were at least partially justified. Violence, it was argued, was a natural response by the black community to a police force which – following the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence many years later – would be officially branded ‘institutionally racist’.
The late Bernie Grant, then the Labour leader of the local Haringey Council – who would become a controversial MP – famously declared in the aftermath of Blakelock’s death that the police were to blame for the riots and ‘got what they deserved’.
Behind bars: Although Winston Silcott was cleared of killing PC Blakelock he was jailed for another murder
Grant and his colleagues certainly appear to have done their bit to hinder the police investigation in the aftermath of the tragedy.
‘By the time we got to the scene, Haringey Council had very quickly engineered the cleaning-up operation,’ a detective who worked on the case recalled.
‘No doubt we lost a lot of forensic evidence – weapons, clothes, other items. They all went down rubbish chutes and were taken away in dustbins.’
It was perhaps therefore hardly surprising that when the six accused men went on trial, in January 1987, the case hinged on what seemed to be flimsy evidence.
There were no forensics linking any of the accused to the crime, and no witnesses from the estate – where roughly one in three residents was black – prepared to identify them as Blakelock’s killers.
Instead, the prosecution revolved around comments defendants had made during lengthy, and highly-controversial, police interrogations.
The three juvenile defendants, aged 14, 15, and 16, were almost immediately cleared after it emerged that they had been stripped naked before questioning, and then quizzed without a lawyer or guardian being present.
The three adults – Winston Silcott, 27, Engin Raghip, 20, and Mark Braithwaite, 20 – were, however, found guilty, and given life in prison.
Dubbed ‘vicious and evil’ by the judge, they began serving their sentences in March 1987. Yet doubts immediately began to surface.
Supporters claimed that the men had been ‘fitted up’ by officers under extreme pressure to solve a crime that had sparked nationwide soul-searching.
Their concerns seemed to be at least partially justified. After a vigorous campaign, all three convictions were overturned in 1991 when an appeals court ruled them ‘unsafe’ amid suspicions that police fabricated key interview notes.
By that time, the so-called ‘Tottenham Three’ were a major Left-wing cause celebre. Silcott, the eldest and the de-facto figurehead of the trio, had even been voted honorary President of the Students’ Union at the London School of Economics.
He would go on to be elected vice president of the National Union of Students, as a supposed ‘figure of national significance’.
But, whatever his role in Blakelock’s death, he was already proving to be a thoroughly ambiguous political hero.
A career criminal, he had served time in borstal as a juvenile for both burglary and assault, having knifed a man during a nightclub dispute.
Cleared: Winston Silcott was one of the
'Tottenham Three' convicted of the murder of PC Blakelock but his, and
the other two men's convictions were overturned in 1991
At the time of the Broadwater riot, he was also on bail for the murder of a boxer and reputed gangster. He was later sentenced to 17 years for that killing. This meant that, while Raghip and Braithwaite walked free in 1991, Silcott would have to wait until 2003 to secure his release.
When he emerged, he was feted by the liberal media, who in some circles compared him to the political prisoner Nelson Mandela.
The Observer newspaper afforded him a fawning interview which described how he was treated like a ‘returning hero’ on the streets of North London, and was seeking to appeal against his conviction for the murder of the boxer.
But that appeal never materialised. And in the intervening decade, Silcott’s career path refused to follow the pre-ordained script.
Despite, like his two co-defendants, having been granted £17,000 compensation for wrongful conviction, along with a further £50,000 in an out-of-court settlement from the Metropolitan Police, Silcott promptly slipped back into a life of petty crime. He was twice convicted of shoplifting and today his whereabouts are unknown.
How different, one might observe, from the fate of the wife and three children of PC Keith Blakelock, who haven’t received a penny in compensation for their loss and have been quietly dignified during the past 28 years.
‘There’s never, ever been a day goes past when I do not think of Keith and this has been hanging over us every day,’ said his widow, Liz, during her most recent major interview.
‘I desperately hope this [current inquiry] leads to something. It will bring the closure that we have never been able to get.’
Now, of course, that long inquiry has borne fruit. The question of whether it will ever allow the Blakelock family to achieve ‘closure’ now seems likely to be settled some time next year, by a jury at the Old Bailey.
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