‘Sacrifice’: Was Kai Shannon wrongfully convicted of murder? – part one

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, 13 years ago, a teenager was handed a life sentence for a deadly knife attack in London. What did the jury convict an innocent man?

0:26Do you want to just do a quick visual description, like what we're looking at? So it's a kind of yellow brick estate. It snakes around in lots of different directions. It's four stories up and halfway up you've got a balcony running all the way along it. Atlee Terrace is a nondescript block of flats in Walthamstow, north-east London. And reporter Emily Dugan has been trying to get to the bottom of a murder that happened here over a decade and a half ago, on the night of the 13th of March 2009. It was quite late already, it was after 11, and a group of young guys were hanging around in stairwell 13 of this block of flats.

1:10And looking through there, it's very dark, it's a concrete stairwell. And they were mostly teenagers, some of them were older, like in their 20s, and they were all connected one way or another to this group called the DM crew. They were drinking and smoking weed. And that was, I mean, basically it was a pretty regular Friday night for them. And the next thing we know that happens for certain is that someone called 999. The paramedics arrived and they found a teenager called Wahab Zaki. He was lying motionless outside the blocker flats. Just after midnight, he was pronounced dead.

1:51So we're now around the back of Atlee Terrace and this is where Wahab had his final moments. At that point he had been stabbed repeatedly and he fell down in the street but they were unable to save him in the ambulance. By the time the police got there anybody who'd actually seen what had happened had already fled. The guys who'd been standing in that stairwell, they were nowhere to be seen. A teenager had been killed and Wahab Saki's family were desperate for answers. You know, they were pleading with anyone who was there that night to come forward. They were giving local newspaper interviews about it.

2:31They just wanted to know why their son had died. But nobody came forward. Then, a year later, a teenager called Kai Shannon was arrested. and the judge at the time called it a cowardly attack on a defenceless young man. 18-year-old Kai Shannon was found guilty of murdering Wahabzaki and sentenced to life in prison. But as Emily has peeled back the layers of this story, she's uncovered serious questions about the official version of what happened that night at Atlee Terrace. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Why Kai Shannon Insists on His Innocence, Part 1.

3:19As a reporter, Emily has a special interest in miscarriages of justice. Her reporting was key to overturning the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson, who spent years in jail for a rape that he didn't commit. And towards the end of last year, she heard about the killing of Wahabzaki and the questions that still swirled around the case more than 16 years later. Kai Shannon has been in prison for murder for over 13 years. He was convicted alongside another teenager, Abu Bakr Allawi, who got nine years for manslaughter. But he has always maintained his innocence, claiming he's a scapegoat set up by other gang members to take the fall for somebody else.

4:01Have you ever been able to interview Kai Shannon in prison? Well, I tried. The Ministry of Justice rejected my request to interview him. Every time I tried, in the case of the interviews, the Ministry of Justice turned it down. And in the case of trying to go and see him in prison, there always seemed to be some sort of admin reason why it was turned down. So we've been exchanging emails and letters, but it's a slow process. You know, every time I send an email, it might be days, it might be weeks before it's cleared for him to read. And then his reply is also vetted over quite a long process.

4:38And what has he told you in his emails and letters about his time with the gang? So he told me that he got involved with it all pretty young. It's this group called the DM crew. And that was around 2005 that he says he first got involved. in one letter he wrote I have many regrets about the life I used to lead and looking back I cannot believe that I allowed myself to be in such a tenuous situation and actually a lot of the emails from Kai like the impression that you have is it's just of someone who is actually full of regret for that time in their life I mean he's had a long time to stew over and reflect on it I know in your reporting you spent a lot of time trying to understand as much as you could about who Kai Shannon is, his backstory and how and why he got involved in this gang in the first place.

5:26What did you learn about him? He had a pretty tough upbringing. There's not really any way you can gloss that. You know, his early years were really hard. So to understand him better, I spoke to his mum, Bianca. There was a lot of instability for Kai's very, very early years. Certainly the first two and a half years or so. A few years after Kai was born, that's when his parents broke up. And Bianca met someone else after Kai's dad and they had two daughters together. And when Kai was around eight, that relationship broke down. There were all kinds of things happening. And that was the point at which Bianca really started to struggle to cope.

6:10Our whole life was now ripped apart. Loads and loads of things changed literally overnight. So there was huge, huge pressure on us as a family and Kai probably paid the biggest price for that. He couldn't cope, he started running away, which is naturally a reaction to our situation. You know, it's a cry for help. But it became dangerous. It became dangerous for him because he was getting further and further away. She had her own struggles too. You know, she was struggling with addiction. You know, there were times when Bianca would say herself that it was really, really difficult. So social services intervened.

6:49You know, they decided it wasn't safe for him and that she wasn't coping with three kids and a boy who at this point was kind of really acting out. And so Kai was taken into care. And I'd get to see him on a Wednesday and a Saturday, right? And that boy would literally be like this, bear hugging my ankle, screaming, don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me.

7:12and eventually just over a year after it all started I had a breakdown lasted for about two years and then it took me another five years to recover once I was out of the breakdown of course by which time Kai was well into his mid-teens and you know I kind of lost him I lost him forever

7:47Throughout his childhood and into his teenage years as Kai was in and out of these care homes or foster placements was there anybody who was really looking out for him? Well there was one person who really stands out a lady who had known his dad as a child who did some work for social services in various capacities herself, and that's Dinah. So I would see him probably once every four to six weeks for quite a long time, really. He was a very sweet little boy, as often little boys are, but as he grew up, of course, he was more, I think, angry, And I think that's the sort of thing that defines him really at that time, angry with how his life was.

8:36And can you describe how things changed for Kai as he became a teenager? Can you remember? He got more disenchanted and I did keep in touch with him, but it was clear that he was getting involved with, you know, gangs, I guess. and he would say to me, they're not gangs, they're my friends. I mean, I do remember walking with him. We went to do some shopping in the market and I was very aware of three or four lads really following us along the market and Kai saying to me at the end, you know, they won't do anything to me while I'm with you. That was an indication that something wasn't good. And, yeah, you could see he was in that kind of crowd of young people.

9:28And I don't know to what extent he was deeply involved in doing the wrong things, but clearly that was round him. That was round his life. What would be the attraction of a gang potentially for Kai at that moment? Obviously it was like a family for him, wasn't it? I mean, like it is for so many young people. It's the family that they don't feel they have. and people I suppose they feel they can rely on because those people are relying on you to do something for them. Did he ever acknowledge the DM crew or this kind of, that there was this bigger group? No, he never spoke to me about that. I mean, I knew he was involved with the gang, but I didn't know sort of, I suppose, how violent or otherwise the gang was.

10:19Did he talk to you about carrying a knife? Well, I saw him carrying a knife, but I know he would say he takes it to defend himself.

10:35And at this point when he was 16, what was his relationship like with his mum? So that's around the time that Bianca started trying to rebuild their relationship. and they were spending more time together. But I think she, I got the impression she realised that things had changed for him and that she started to worry about him. He had started getting into trouble, you know, so you could see it unraveling. But I didn't realise how deeply he had got in, you know, because I just thought that he, like, I just thought he had a gang of friends. I didn't realise that he was deep inside, like a gang gang, you know.

11:17And what was the first sign you had of that then, do you remember? Probably when it all happened. Yeah.

11:33So the night that Wahab Zaki was killed, Kai and his mum were supposed to be speaking on the phone and she just couldn't get hold of him. And I was quite concerned because I'd been ringing, ringing, ringing and his phone was not answering, it wasn't going through. That was unusual. And if we had made a time to speak or meet or whatever, to not do that was unusual. So I remember being quite worried. And then the next day she finds out that he'd gone to his grandma's house that night and she did get hold of him on the phone eventually and he told her what had happened the night before. And, you know, he told me something bad had happened.

12:06and he had been there because it was his friends and they were all hanging out, but it wasn't him that was involved, that he wasn't there at the time that it all happened. But he was scared because they were all friends and he was scared that he was going to be questioned and arrested and whatever. And I just told him, look, if what you've told me is true, which I believe it is, you've got nothing to worry about. You just tell them the truth.

12:38What do we know about Wahab Zaki, the young man who was murdered on the night of the 13th of March 2009? So I tried to speak to Wahab Zaki's family for this podcast, as well as trying to reach out to a former girlfriend, but nobody got back to me. But what we do know is that at the time that all this was being reported, a lot was made of the fact that his street name was Killer, that he carried knives himself and that he was a member of a gang. but other friends didn't remember him like that. You know, they would see him as the funny one in the group that could always make people laugh and I really got the impression from interviews given afterwards that his parents were probably quite upset by the way that that was reported at the time.

13:21They'd lost their son. They didn't want to remember him as someone who'd been involved in a gang and carried a knife. Wahab also had a girlfriend and she actually found out after he was killed that she was pregnant. She ended up having a daughter who she spoke to a BBC documentary about back in 2010. I wanted the baby anyways, and it would be nice for his mum and his family and me that we have part of him with us, living on. But have you thought what you might say to her about what happened to her father? No, I hadn't really thought about that, which I should really. I can't tell her why and what happened.

14:09You still don't know? No.

14:16Kai Shannon was charged with Wahab Zaki's murder. What was the prosecution's case against him when it went to trial? Well, the prosecution had to somehow build a case despite the fact that they never established a motive. So when his trial came to the Old Bailey in summer 2012, the case against Kai really was that witnesses put him at the scene of the crime that night. So he was seen in the stairwell that night amongst other guys. There was also the fact that when he was questioned by police, he changed his version of events as to where he was when the attack happened. Then there was the knife itself.

14:58So there were fragments of DNA that were found on that knife where Shannon couldn't be eliminated as a suspect. And then on the day that he was arrested, the police searched his flat and they found a rucksack with a sawn-off shotgun in it, which he said he was keeping for a gang member, an older gang member. But the most compelling thing, really, the thing that the prosecution was really relying on was this key witness who said he saw Kai stab Wahab.

15:32So tell me about this kind of star prosecution witness. What was their version of events of the night? So this man, whose name is Rhys Williams. So like Kai, he was a member of the DM crew. His version of events was that he had known Wahab Zaki since he was a kid, since they were at school together. And that on the night of the tag, they'd been together at Atlee Terrace and they were just smoking a joint above the stairwell itself. And he said he'd been there about five minutes when suddenly Kai Shannon and another boy rush up the stairs and attack Wahab. So his witness statement said he, quote, jumped in the middle to stop Wahab from being attacked.

16:15Wahab was behind me and they were in front of me. I think I put out my left hand to start to block them. And that's when I first saw the knife as it went through the back of my left hand that I was using to try to shield Wahab. He says he was right there and saw it with his own eyes. Yeah, very much. He was very much painting himself as a good friend who defended his friend that night and was just there helping someone out. He said that Wahab managed to get away and that Kai and the other boy followed. And that this guy said he ran into a friend who said he saw blood dripping from his arms. And just so I'm clear, when you just said that the witness left and ran into a friend who saw blood dripping from his hands, is this a suggestion that that's Wahab's blood or that he had been hurt himself trying to defend Wahab?

17:08So he was hurt himself. He got injuries to his hand and his wrist. And that was never in doubt. That's why police focused in on speaking to him, because they could tell from his injuries that he was, you know, that was the one person they could be sure was there that night.

17:30OK, so this is the story Rhys Williams told the jury when he was in the witness box at Kai Shannon's trial in 2012. Kai's mum, Bianca, and his family friend, Dinah, were both there. What did they remember about it? Well, yeah, I mean, they were both there. And I think the thing that stuck out to me from what Dinah said was that Kai seemed to be kind of torpedoing himself. I can recall Kai really losing it and, you know, being very clear that he wasn't guilty, but not being his own best advocate. You know, he really could lose it and be very abusive and, you know, use some fairly eye-watering language towards the judge.

18:17Which can't have gone down very well. No, it wasn't. I mean, it was painful to hear that because you thought, Kai, you're not doing yourself any favours. You know, this is not going to help your case. And for someone, whether in the jury or the judge himself, how do you think they would have perceived Kai from the way he presented in court? An unruly young man, capable of anything. I imagine that's the impression they had.

18:49It was the night before the verdict and I had a dream and I dreamt that he was going to get found guilty. And he was. Kai was found guilty.

19:03So I was absolutely devastated, and I was just glad that my mum had passed away the year before. She wasn't alive to see it, you know? There's a sense of disbelief and shock and horror, and it's like, oh, my God, no. I just don't... No, no, this is wrong. This can't be happening. I don't actually believe that this has just happened.

19:32Kaishan was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Wahabzaki, as well as for wounding the witness, Rhys Williams, with intent. But since the conviction, there have been questions raised about the safety of those convictions. When did these doubts start to surface? So, right from the beginning, there were people who had doubts. It's always troubled me, this one. I've always had questions. Max Harris was his solicitor at the time. He left the law now a decade ago. He's now running a microbrewery in Wales. But he did make the time to speak to me. And it is striking that this is a case, after all this time, that really sticks with him as one where something went wrong.

20:13When you look back at the cases you worked on in your career, are there many that stick out as being potential miscarriages of justice? No, no. No, I wouldn't say so. This one for me has always had a question mark over it. And what was the main thing that bothered Max about the case? I think for Max, it really comes down to the DNA evidence and how it was presented to the jury. So what they had were fragments of DNA. And forensic science as it was then, that was really pretty useless. All they could say for certain was that there were certain people you couldn't eliminate and Kai couldn't be eliminated.

20:56But that's not the same as saying that Kai Shannon's DNA was on the knife. But when Kai was arrested, the police told him that they'd discovered his DNA on the knife, but it just wasn't true. He was told that in the hope that it would make him panic, as it would anybody, whether you're guilty or not. If you're told your DNA is on the murder weapon, you're going to panic. I think Max's position is that they were trying to coerce him into saying that he'd touched the knife by presenting him with a false account of the forensics that he had. Kai did then tell police he'd handled the knife. So Kai was saying that he handled the knife but that he didn't use it to stab Wahabzaki.

21:37Did you ask Kai about this police interview? So in one of Kai's letters he told me when I was arrested I was misled in an interview about the DNA evidence. I then stupidly thought that my DNA had been planted on the knife. I also thought that there's no way the jury would believe me if I said that it's been planted as I thought it had been. So in a panic, I attempted to come up with a reasonable account for the DNA. But you said that Kai changed his story about where he was at the time of the murder. And that doesn't look great, does it? So when the police first asked him where he was that night, he never denied that he'd been in the stairwell earlier on.

22:17But what he said was that he'd gone to the chicken shop around the corner and that he'd gone away at that moment. And it was only later that he then changed his story and said, look, I wasn't at the chicken shop. I was collecting drugs. And so changing your story can often be a red flag. But I guess it's a difficult one because it's quite convenient to have an alibi that takes you away at the moment of the stabbing. Of course it is. But equally, you could understand how you don't trust the police. Say if you come at it from the position that he's innocent and he's just trying to explain where he was, you wouldn't necessarily choose to tell the police that what you were doing was illegal.

23:00OK, so it sounds like a very convenient alibi that Kai was there, but not for those very crucial few minutes when the murder actually took place. I mean, absolutely. And you have to interrogate this alibi and it is very hard to stand it up. But actually, one of the things that stands out is that there might have been a way for Kai to stand up. Kai always said he only knew the drug dealer by his nickname and that he didn't know where he lived. And the police then later did identify a man they thought might be the drug dealer that Kai described. Because he had quite distinctive features. He was American and he lived in the area.

23:40And they just they had they had a whole description of him and his nickname. and buried in the files that were disclosed at the 11th hour in this case was one line in a big table saying that they'd identified this man, giving his name and saying they'd asked him, but he didn't know who Kai Shannon was and says he wasn't there that night. Now, obviously that sounds like a dead end, except for the fact that in the trial, it was presented that this man was entirely a figment of Kai's imagination. So they didn't flag this piece of disclosure. so they didn't flag that they may have found the identity of this person so that he could be called as a witness.