LET'S be clear. We are not saying that Abdul Ahmed acted dishonestly at any time during his interviews with police officers or while giving evidence at trial. No doubt he thought he was helping police with their inquiries and did his best to convey what he says he saw that day in 2005 to the best of his ability. 

As Jason’s defence barrister, the late David Howker QC, said in his closing speech at the Old Bailey: “Look, no-one is suggesting Mr Ahmed is lying. No-one is suggesting that when he came into that witness box, and when he spoke to the police on the day, he was not doing his best.”

Howker asked the jury: “You have to consider whether he is a reliable and accurate witness? Might he have made a mistake? That is what it amounts to. There are a number of things that we think, and we submit to you, should be troubling you.

“Firstly, what is Mr Ahmed’s state of mind that morning? What is he doing, where is he going, what is he thinking about, what is his plan? What Mr Ahmed is doing that day is, he is leaving his house and he is coming into Gants Hill because he has a meeting at a finance company – that is what is on his mind.

“The first thing he does is he goes to the wrong place. He goes to Grange Hill (Central Line underground station) rather than Gants Hill, so he is not firing on all cylinders. He has made a mistake. If he has made a mistake, he is now, one would think, possibly running a bit late but he is in the wrong place. 

“He gets back on the tube and eventually gets to Gants Hill and now he has to find the building. He has an address but he cannot find the building. It is raining, it is a miserable day. We all know what those days are like; you get off the tube, you are wet through. It rains in your face, you are already late and you do not know where you are going. 

“He cannot find the building and so he goes into the pizza place and says words to the effect: ‘Is this Perth Road?’ Yes, it is. He comes out of the pizza place and he still cannot find the building. He walks right past it, perhaps understandably in the rain. That is the scene-setter, if you like. Is he, do you think, straight off a man who has his mind on other things? 

“He walks out of Perth Road for a bit trying to find this building. One imagines he is looking around at the buildings and thinking, ‘where on earth is this place?’ and as he does so, a black BMW drives past and he has no particular reason to notice anything about it. The only reason it catches his eye is because it stops. It stops sort of in the middle of the road and another car stops behind it. He is unable to tell you the make of the car behind it. 

“He actually says to us, when we say ‘can you at least help us with the sort of size and shape and what have you of the car?’, he said he thought it was a smallish car, like a Ford Fiesta. You all know what a Ford Fiesta looks like. It does not look anything like a BMW convertible. You say to me, ‘so what?’. The so what is it gives you a clue as to how much of the scene he has taken in. 

“Of course, it is understandable, he is moving and walking. He tells you he was walking up and down this road, he was trying to find the building and the rain was chucking it down. What happens after that, although we spent a very long time breaking it down bit by bit and analysing it almost frame by frame, what happened thereafter happened very quickly.

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Whatever it was that happened very quickly, Mr Ahmed is watching as he is walking away back towards the roundabout, still trying to find the finance house. He is walking way and looking over his shoulder. 

“When you add all those bits and pieces together . . . his frame of mind and his principle reason for being there, he is not sitting in his garden on a deck chair having a lemonade just watching the world go by, is he? He is out on the street, he is wet, it is miserable, he is trying to find a place, he is moving and he is looking back over his shoulder. Those are not ideal conditions for taking in a scene, which probably explains why he thought it was a Fiesta.

“Of course, the scene as it unfolds is obscured to him in this way. As he walks up Gants Hill and looks around, the black BMW, the car is between him and the action (as I will call it). What he therefore has is a view of Mr Darby’s top half, or top third depending on where Darby sits in relation to the height of the BMW and the car door is open as well. In other words, that which he actually takes in in that very brief moment of the action is obscured.

“Afterwards, he does not see where the silver car, which he thinks is a Fiesta, goes. He does not see the black BMW drive into the (pub) car park. Obvious big things. 

“When the police say to him, on the day: ‘Would you recognise any of these men?’, he says ‘no’. 

 

“That is the star witness for the prosecution, because he is the only one who says that man had a knife in his hand. You are going to have to be very cautious about that because as much as the prosecution like to tell you about the things that Mr Ahmed got right, and he was bound to get things right if he was there, he is bound to get some things right. You really need to think about the things he got wrong and I have just highlighted a number of them to you.

“If you are going to convict this man of murder, because Mr Ahmed is the star witness, he is the one who said he (Jason) had a knife and you are going to have to be confident in that man’s evidence in order to bring a verdict of guilty against that man. 

“What Mr Ahmed did after supposedly seeing a man stab another man, he did not stay rooted to the spot and effectively say, ‘Oh my God, what have I just seen? Where is my phone; let me run to the pub, let me tell someone, this is terrible’. He carries on and he goes down to Gants Hill tube station, makes a phone call to the finance company to say: ‘I am running a bit late, can you just tell me where you are again?’, and then goes to the finance company where he is due. 

“In other words, he carries on his business and only at that stage, when he says whatever he says to someone in there, does he come back out onto the street and speak to the police.”

In fact, it was a manager at Welcome Finance who urged Ahmed to go and talk to police gathered at the crime scene, just a matter of yards away, and tell them what he had seen.

In his final address to the jury, Howker added: “I am not criticising him, we all react differently to different situations, but it does tend to show what is uppermost in his mind.

“The point is, this is a man the prosecution want you to rely on. They want you to say you can rely on this man’s evidence. 

“Our submission to you is simple; he has done his best in difficult conditions, he gets things right, he gets things wrong. Moore is a big bloke, you are never going to forget there was a big bloke there, are you? But when it comes down to some of the detail and sometimes important details and obvious details; such as ‘what sort of car was it?’ . . . he is just getting it all over the shop, even on his own, as it were, version of things. 

“As I say, we are not complaining about the fact that he is a human and he is fallible, but we do complain about the fact that the prosecution are saying to you: ‘You can rely on this man’. You can absolutely rely on this man to convict my lay client of murder. THAT is what we complain about. That is why we raise these considerations with you, because it is not as easy and as simple as it might be portrayed.

“Members of the jury, we again, with respect to Mr Ahmed, do not say he is lying. We do not say he has not tried his best and obviously he is convinced what he says is right. But there are too many flaws in it. Too many flaws in it for you to, with confidence, act upon it.”