Will Stone
RINF Alternative News
Head of Scotland Yard Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe faced a grilling from MPs yesterday over his failure to reassure MPs that police officers shredded “possibly thousands” of anti-corruption files.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mr Hogan-Howe admitted to the home affairs select committee that he had not contacted his predecessors over the claims exposed by the Stephen Lawrence review.
Nor, the police chief admitted, had he asked to see a 2012 memo written by Detective Superintendent David Hurley that reportedly summarises contents of now-destroyed files which contain evidence of wholesale criminal behaviour by trusted police officers.
The memo reportedly reveals officers stole and trafficked illegal drugs, shared reward payouts with informants, sold confidential police intelligence to criminals and fabricated applications for more rewards and accepted bribes to destroy and fabricate evidence.
In a heated exchange, committee chairman Keith Vaz told Mr Hogan-Howe that he had failed to reassure the group of MPs that the force was taking appropriate action to investigate the destruction of the files.
Revelations that anti-corruption files, gathered under Operation Othona, were destroyed came in Mark Ellison QC’s review of the Stephen Lawrence investigation.
Published earlier this month, the report found that an undercover police officer was working within the “Lawrence family camp” in the late 90s as evidence was being taken for the judicial inquiry led by Sir William Macpherson into Stephen’s death.
Mr Lawrence, 18, was stabbed to death by a group of up to six white youths in an unprovoked racist attack as he waited at a bus stop in Eltham, south-east London, with a friend on April 22 1993.
In the wake of the Ellison Review’s publication, Commander Richard Walton was temporarily removed from his post as head of the Met’s counter-terrorism command SO15 over his links to the undercover operations.