Press Release: End in sight in corruption murder : 17th June 2007
Metropolitan police have submitted a file to the Crown Prosecution Service after a fifth
investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a London private investigator axed to death in
1987.The inquiry has been led by Det Ch Supt David Cook.
The Morgan family have always believed that Daniel was murdered because he was about to expose
police corruption and have fought a long and often bitter battle to bring his killers to justice.
An inquest in 1988 heard allegations that Daniel Morgan’s partner, Jonathan Rees, had planned the
murder with the assistance of officers from Catford police station and that Daniel’s place in his
company would be taken over after the murder by a member of the murder squad, Detective Sergeant
Sidney Fillery. Fillery later took early retirement and took over Daniel Morgan’s place in the
company.
The file presented to the CPS amounts to around 300 pages and represents the product of five
investigations, some of them highly contentious. Daniel Morgan’s murder is one of the
most-investigated murders in British policing history.
“It has been a long and sometimes hellish struggle for us to get to this point” said Daniel’s
brother Alastair today. “We will now have to wait several months for the Crown Prosecution to decide
whether and against whom charges will be brought. We want the whole truth to come out so that we can
move on with our lives”.
The family have been told that the submission of the file to the CPS will not be the end of the
investigation and that offices will continue to seek evidence to support the prosecution of all
those involved in the murder.
“In the past, the Met’s treatment of my family has been shabby and downright provocative. In
1998-99, an inquiry was carried out behind our backs after we’d been campaigning for over a decade.
The Met then forced us into a high court battle to obtain disclosure in 2003 of a report by
Hampshire police on the murder”.
“Throughout our twenty-year battle, the Home Office has been an utter waste of space. We tried
everything in our power to warn them about serious police corruption and were ignored year after
year. It took seventeen and a half years before we were granted a meeting with a minister, Hazel
Blears. We found them uniformly remote, gullible and ill-informed. I do not believe anyone in that
department has ever read a report on Daniel’s murder”.
Since the intervention of the Metropolitan Police Authority in 2005, the family say that the climate
has changed radically and that they finally have confidence in the integrity of the current
investigation. Until this point every single institution designed to protect against police
malpractice has failed us.