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from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

Guardian

Fayed loses high court action against Met

Jamie Wilson
Guardian
Wednesday August 14, 2002

Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed yesterday lost a high court action against the Metropolitan police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment on suspicion of theft and criminal damage to the contents of a safety deposit box, belonging to his arch rival, the late Tiny Rowland.

Mr Fayed and four others, including his head of security, John Macnamara, claimed they were wrongly arrested in March 1998 in connection with a break-in to the box kept at the Knightsbridge store.

Yesterday Mr Justice Cresswell dismissed the action against the Metropolitan police commissioner and four other officers, saying: "I find that a reasonable man would have been of the opinion that, having regard to the information which was in the mind of the arresting officer, there were reasonable grounds for suspecting Mr Al Fayed to be guilty of theft and criminal damage jointly with others." Mr Fayed, who was not in court for the ruling and did not give evidence during the hearing, said that he was "appalled" and described the judgment as a "travesty of justice".

"I have instructed my lawyers to launch an immediate appeal because the ruling strikes at the heart of civil liberties and undermines the fundamental principles of freedom which the law is supposed to uphold," he said.

Graham Small, the lawyer who acted for Jeffrey Rees, the now retired detective chief superintendent who led the investigation, said: "We are delighted that the decision to arrest Mohamed Al Fayed and his cohorts has been vindicated. We have always been confident of success in this case. There was an abundance of evidence that led my client to suspect Mr Al Fayed had been involved in several unauthorised openings of the safe deposit box in question.

"The greatest travesty is that the Met was taken from fighting crime to go into court to defend themselves."

In his judgment Mr Cresswell rehearsed the background to the police investigation, codenamed Operation Jagon, into alleged break-ins to a number of Harrods safety deposit boxes.

They included a box belonging to Mr Rowland, which he claimed contained documents, reels of film, and emeralds worth £250,000.

Mr Rowland claimed the contents had been tampered with and the emeralds had disappeared. "It's all been torn, they're just a lot of thieves," a detective recorded Mr Rowland as saying after the box was opened under controlled conditions in 1997.

Several witnesses, including Bob Loftus, a former Harrods employee, backed up Mr Rowland's version.

Mr Loftus described how a locksmith had been brought to Harrods one night in 1995 to open the box, the contents of which were taken to Mr Fayed's office on the fifth floor. Using plastic gloves from the Harrods food hall, the contents were inspected and shown to Mr Fayed.

On March 2 1998 Mr Fayed, Mr Macnamara, Paul Handley- Greaves, Colin Dalma, John Allen and a sixth man, Mark Griffiths, who was not part of the action against the Met, were arrested at Kennington police station. They were later released without charge and no charges were brought.

In March 2000 Mr Fayed told the high court he had "no personal responsibility" for the disappearance of the gems, but paid Mr Rowland's widow, Josephine, £1.4m in damages after accepting responsibility as the owner of the store for the opening of the box.

Mr Fayed and the other four claimants advanced their case against the police on the basis that the arresting officers did not have reasonable grounds to suspect arrestable offences had been carried out.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

(posted 7898 days ago)

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