A Jamaican Yardie gunman who was jailed for 14 years for his part in a spectacular armed robbery is expected to walk free from the Court of Appeal today after Scotland Yard conceded that one of their most highly prized informers had lied in evidence against him.
Rohan ‘Bumpy’ Thomas was jailed in October 1995 on the word of Eaton Green, a Yardie gangster whose work as an informer led the Metropolitan Police to describe him as “a jewel in our crown.” Green told Leicester Crown Court that Thomas had been part of a Yardie gang which raided an unlicenced dance in a warehouse in Nottingham in May 1993, stripping 150 people of all their cash, credit cards, jewellery and mobile phones.
Under cross-examination, Green swore that he had never killed anyone and that he had never fired a gun in England. However, within weeks of the end of the trial, he made a lengthy statement to Scotland Yard in which he admitted murdering eleven people in Jamaica and committing numerous offences with a firearm in London. This was effectively an admission of perjury, which has forced the Crown to throw in its hand at Thomas’ appeal today.
His release is the latest in a series of embarrassments for the Metropolitan Police in their handling of Jamaican Yardie informers. There was an outcry when Thomas was jailed after it was disclosed that even though he had a history of shooting policemen in Jamaica, he had been allowed to enter the UK illegally by Scotland Yard’s intelligence department, SO11.
Since then, the Guardian has disclosed how SO11 repeatedly bent the law and broke Home Office guidelines, turning a blind eye to crimes committed by their Yardie informers; attempting to abort a trial when one of them was in the dock; failing to take any action to prosecute Green for his confessions of murder and multiple robbery; and colluding with the immigration service to allow other notoriously violent Yardies to stay illegally in the UK in exchange for becoming informers.
The Metropolitan Police has taken no disciplinary action against any officer but last month, following a detailed report by the Guardian and Granada TV’s World In Action, the Chief Constable of Hampshire Police, John Hoddinott, was appointed by the Police Complaints Authority to investigate the case of Delroy Denton, an informer who was allowed to stay illegally in the UK and who used the time to rape a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Tooting and then to rape and murder a young mother in Brixton, Marcia Lawes.
Denton was never prosecuted for the rape of the schoolgirl and was originally released without trial for the murder of Marcia Lawes before being re-arrested and convicted. Mr Hoddinott is believed to be investigating the decisions not to prosecute Denton as well as looking at how Denton came to be in the country for more than a year even though the Home Office had produced a letter ordering his removal.
