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When 18-year-old Wahab Zaaki was found bleeding to death from five stab wounds on an east London estate, police were under immense pressure to find his killer.
It was spring 2009 and knife crime in the capital had been branded an epidemic. Zaaki was one of four teenagers killed in separate incidents over just three days in London that March.
For the last 13 years, Kai Shannon has been in prison on a life sentence after being convicted of Zaaki’s murder and the wounding of another gang member. He has always insisted he is innocent.
Shannon was among a large group of young men who were hanging around stairwell 13 of the Attlee Terrace estate in Walthamstow that night. He was 17 and he and Zaaki were junior members of a local gang known as the DM crew.
At the time of Shannon’s arrest he told anyone who would listen that he was not guilty – that he had not been in the stairwell during the fatal stabbing – but the evidence of another gang member was key to securing his conviction.
While there were witnesses and phone records that put Shannon in the stairwell in the hours before the attack, the only person to testify to the events of the stabbing itself was one fellow gang member. He had been injured that night and was initially arrested for the murder but not charged. Two years later, after being contacted regularly by the police, who told him he would receive help finding accommodation if he became a witness, the man said Shannon had killed Zaaki.
No DNA linked Shannon to the crime and no motive was ever established.
Now 32, Shannon is still serving an indeterminate life sentence with a minimum term of 18 years but has hope that his insistence on his innocence is being heard by those with the power to get his conviction re-considered.
His case is being championed by former detective superintendent Graham Satchwell, the officer who helped victims gather vital evidence against the corrupt police officer Derek Ridgewell. It has also been taken on by academics and students at the University of Manchester’s Innocence Project.
On Tuesday, Satchwell wrote to the criminal cases review commission, having uncovered fresh concerning details about the case and appealing for them to investigate and refer it for appeal. Satchwell’s letter followed a formal application to the CCRC made by him and the Innocence Project in October that ran to more than 200 pages.
Writing from prison in HMP Full Sutton in Yorkshire, Shannon said: “I was no angel in 2009 but I was and am still no murderer. I have been scapegoated by ex associates and the authorities.”
Several other gang members with forensic links to the crime scene were never charged – and Shannon’s representatives want the CCRC to explore the investigation of alternative suspects and whether they were offered deals by the police.
In a covert recording of a conversation between Shannon and a witness about how he came to be convicted, Shannon was told: “You [were] the sacrifice.” When Shannon said he did not kill anyone, the man answers: “I know, I know.”
The latest CCRC application includes analysis by a slang expert of the 2014 call. His work suggests Shannon was told on the call that singling him out as a suspect was a “group decision”.
In an echo of Andrew Malkinson’s case, when Shannon first applied to the CCRC with the recording, among other evidence, it took them more than three years to decide to reject the case, in 2018, which they did without commissioning further forensic testing.
When the case was refused, Shannon’s then-lawyer made a final request that further forensic work be conducted on the knife, given scientific advances in DNA. None was done.
Satchwell said: “I know how bad the culture can be in the police. This was a major murder investigation and a highly politicised one. London was in the middle of a knife crime epidemic, there were numerous cases of young men in gangs being stabbed across London. Undoubtedly the police would have been under pressure from the home secretary at the time to get results.
“Coming to the case knowing that background, I read the papers that were available at that stage and it was clear that the prosecution was relying on dodgy forensic evidence and a single dodgy prosecution witness.”
A knife found at the scene, which had Zaaki’s blood on the blade and handle, had extremely low quality DNA and fingerprints recovered from it. The limited forensic evidence was enough to eliminate some of the suspects but not Shannon.
Abubakar Alawi, Shannon’s co-accused, was convicted of manslaughter and unlawful wounding largely on the basis of the testimony of a fellow gang member. The prosecution witness gave several different accounts of what happened that night. At the trial he claimed that Alawi and Shannon had run up the stairs and attacked him and Zaaki where they were smoking cannabis. Unlike Shanon, Alawi was able to say that forensic testing of the knife eliminated him as a suspect.
A forensic expert said that such a limited mixed DNA profile should have had no weight attached to it, and that if the jury did not have this properly explained to them in court it could be prejudicial and “extremely dangerous”.
Shannon wants the knife retested using advances in forensic techniques that helped exonerate Malkinson. He said: “I believe I was set up by members of my own gang to take the rap … I do not 100% know who committed this crime but I strongly believe it was old associates of mine who were involved.
“I was an active gang member from 2005 to 2010, involved in drug dealing and low level violence (fights etc). I have never used a knife to injure anybody, although I did carry one.
“Looking back now I seriously regret my actions as a child and being involved with criminality. I plan to clear my name for this awful crime.”
Shannon’s distinctive tracksuit and trainers he had been seen wearing that night were also taken and tested and no blood or forensic evidence was found.
Shannon said: “On a normal day such a huge fact in itself would clear me of any involvement. The prosecution, however, argued that I must have had an identical outfit. This is not only wrong but was said with no evidence.”
Prof Claire McGourlay, who runs the Innocence Project, said: “With the support of a senior former police officer, we believe to now possess a substantial quantity of evidence rendering Shannon’s conviction unsafe. We intend to do everything in our power to see what we feel is a significant miscarriage of justice reviewed by the CCRC and the court of appeal.”
Shannon’s mother, Bianca Simpson, is fighting to get her son’s conviction overturned. In the years leading up to Shannon’s arrest she was dealing with her own drug addiction, and he was in and out of care from the age of eight.
Simpson, 52, says at the time of the incident Shannon had been placed alone in a flat by social services and was vulnerable to the ersatz family offered by a gang. “He needed that connection, a sense of family, a sense of belonging. I just think he was being used. Being fed just enough to feel like a somebody. He was just too young and blinded.”
She believes if he had not gone to prison he would probably be dead now. “I don’t think he would have lasted out there very long, because that’s the life, isn’t it? It’s prison or death a lot of the time, and I think that Kai had enough haters, clearly, because they were quite quick to sacrifice him in this way.”
Satchwell said Shannon had faced a “tremendous imbalance of power” in his case. “I think Kai was the easy victim for both the police and the gang. He had been in and out of care all his life so he was a very easy target with no support from anyone.”
After Shannon’s initial arrest, police searched the flat where he had been placed alone by the local authority since he was 16. They found a shotgun he said he was storing for older gang members.
Satchwell said: “As a younger member of the gang he was the perfect choice for the senior members of the gang – or the elders as they are known – to store a firearm for them.
“Once he had been found with a firearm, he was a convenient target then as a murder suspect. From the gang’s point of view he was the only person who was not in a position to spill the beans on the guilty parties because he was not there.”
Shannon always said he was not in the stairwell when the attack took place. He later told police he had gone to pick up cannabis from a local drug dealer, whom he described as having an American accent and being known locally as “Ray”.
The prosecution argued in court that the man was a figment of Shannon’s imagination – and that he did not exist. Yet now a note in the police files, not properly disclosed before the trial, reveals that they did trace a man they believed to be the dealer whom Shannon was never able to call as a witness.
The Guardian managed to find the man, who said he remembered the police asking after Shannon but denied knowing him.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan police said: “We are aware of the case and await contact from the criminal cases review commission.”
A CCRC spokesperson said: “Mr Shannon has made two applications to the CCRC. The first application did not result in a referral. We have received a second application in relation to this case, and it would be inappropriate to comment any further at this stage.”
