Yesterday the Sunday Times confirmed a Bellingcat report from 8 June that the IPCC is investigating its former head of investigations Roy Clark for providing ‘misleading information’ during the Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1998
“Documents obtained under freedom of information laws reveal that he is at the centre of the investigation into allegations that senior police officers had failed to hand over key information to Macpherson.
The IPCC inquiry was triggered by Stephen’s father Neville Lawrence who alleged that senior officers including Lord Stevens, then deputy commissioner of the Met, had failed to provide “full, frank and truthful” information to Macpherson.”
What the Sunday Times fails to report, however, is Roy Clark’s links to the third abortive investigation into the Daniel Morgan Murder.
When he was deputy commissioner, Lord Stevens took an active role in supervising the operation against Southern Investigations in 1998-99, key members of which were suspected of involvement in the murder of Daniel in 1987.
However, Operations Nigeria and Two Bridges were run by Roy Clark, then a Deputy Assistant commissioner in charge of CIB3, also known as the ‘Ghost Squad’. Though these operations were ostensibly part of a reopened investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan, the family were never informed. They were shut down early with the conviction of Jonathan Rees and a police officer for trying to plant cocaine on a mother during a custody battle.
At least 30 other crimes were detected involving corrupt police, private investigators and journalists (mainly from News of the World) these resulted in no prosecutions and only became public knowledge recently.
Daniel Morgan’s brother, Alastair, only learned of this third secret investigation when it was nearing conclusion and had to be stopped. The revelation came as a shock. As Alastair told me today: “By this time we’d been campaigning to have the case reopened for ten years, so we were upset about this secrecy, particularly since we’d been campaigning about serious corruption in Daniel’s murder.”
The Morgan family were so unhappy about the secret limited third investigation that when Roy Clark was appointed as the IPCC’s director of investigations in the Spring of 2004, they wrote to its chairman Nick Hardwick to express their concerns.
They complained that Clark’s inquiry had been undertaken “behind our backs” even though “we had been lobbying MPs and senior police officers for a decade.” They claimed that Clark had been highly resistant to disclosing any information from previous inquiries, and refused to acknowledge any police officers were suspects in Daniel’s murder.
The April 2004 letter concluded: “In all the circumstances, however, we feel that Mr Clark’s position is untenable. Whom, for example, in the new IPCC could we now entrust with a truly independent investigation into Daniel’s murder?”
However, Alastair’s objections were ignored, and Clark was appointed. He was awarded the CBE in 2009 Birthday Honours list, and is currently the Director of Criminal Investigations for HM Revenue and Customs. He is also the first IPCC head of investigations to be investigated by the IPCC.
There are other connections between the Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan murders which I will report on as soon as possible…