Judge rejects claims from eight ex-officers that they were wrongly investigated for allegedly framing suspects in 1988 murder of Lynette White

Police detectives were within their rights to investigate colleagues involved in the notorious Cardiff Three miscarriage of justice murder case whom they suspected of framing the innocent men, a senior judge has ruled.

Mr Justice Wyn Williams also said he found it hard to see how false accusations from key witnesses that helped convict the three for the murder of 20-year-old Lynette White would have emerged as they did if a police officer was not instrumental.

Eight officers were put on trial for allegedly “fitting up” the Cardiff Three, but the case against the officers collapsed and they were acquitted. They sued South Wales police, claiming they were wrongly investigated and prosecuted.

However, Williams rejected their allegations on Tuesday, ruling that the force was within its rights to investigate the officers.

White, a sex worker, was stabbed more than 50 times at the flat where she worked in the Cardiff docks area in 1988.

Stephen Miller, Yusef Abdullahi and Tony Paris were convicted of her murder in 1990 and jailed. Their convictions were quashed two years later and the men, nicknamed the Cardiff Three, were released. In 2003, another man, Jeffrey Gafoor, admitted murdering White; he is now serving a life sentence.

South Wales police launched a lengthy and detailed investigation into the actions of officers involved in the original investigation.

In 2011, the eight former officers were tried for “acting corruptly together” to make a case against the Cardiff Three. Prosecutors claimed their case was “largely the product of the imagination”.

The former police officers – Graham Mouncher, Richard Powell, Thomas Page, Michael Daniels, Paul Jennings, Paul Stephen, Peter Greenwood and John Seaford – all denied conspiring to pervert the course of justice. The trial, the biggest of its kind against British police officers, collapsed, costing the taxpayer an estimated £30m.

Cardiff Three: ex-officers sue South Wales police over miscarriage of justice saga Read more

Suing South Wales police, the eight claimed the officers investigating them began with the mindset that they were guilty. They also claimed that the assumption that Gafoor acted alone and the Cardiff Three were “wholly innocent” was “questionable”.

Another claim was that the officers leading the inquiry were swayed by a book on the Cardiff Three, Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry, written by the investigative journalist Satish Sekar. It argued that the White team had moulded and manipulated evidence.

Williams emphasised that it was not his task to say whether the eight officers were guilty or innocent. However, he flagged up concerns about the false accusations made by four key witnesses that helped convict the Cardiff Three.

He said: “I find it very difficult to understand how the accounts emerged as they did if no police officer was instrumental in what occurred.

“I have reached the clear conclusion that reasonable grounds existed from the start of LW3 [the inquiry into the White team] to suspect that the untruthful accounts which the core four gave about the involvement of the original defendants in Lynette’s murder were brought about by criminal conduct on the part of police officers involved in LW1 [the original investigation].

“In my judgment, it was permissible for LW3 officers to suspect that officers who had been part of LW1 … had engaged in a conspiracy to mould and manipulate evidence.”

The eight officers had accused the force of “misfeasance in public office” by deliberately or recklessly acting beyond its powers when it investigated them, and also claimed they were falsely imprisoned.

In a summary of his judgment, Williams said: “The claimants have failed to prove these allegations. I have concluded that no officer of SWP [South Wales police] recklessly exceeded his/her powers.”

He added: “I found the defendant [the police] proved on the balance of probabilities that there were reasonable grounds to suspect the claimants had committed one or more of the offences for which they were arrested.”

In his judgment, Williams said that when one of the officers, Page, was arrested, numerous pieces of burnt paper were found in his garden. Page claimed they were the remnants of very old diaries and pocket books, which he was destroying because he was moving home and were nothing to do with the White case. But the judge said his account was “open to considerable doubt”.

On the Sekar book, the judge said he did not believe that it created a “fixed mindset” within the investigators. However, he said he believed the senior investigating officer, Christopher Coutts, was on “thin ice” when he made remarks such as it was his job, or the job of LW3 officers, to put right the wrongs that had taken place in 1988.

“However, the reality is that … Mr Coutts had formed the view that many police suspects should be prosecuted,” added Williams. “He had formed that view because he had by then come to believe that they had committed serious criminal offences during the course of LW1. As I have concluded already, there was a proper basis for Mr Coutts’ belief.”