Daniel Morgan case: Met Police branded ‘institutionally corrupt’

An independent panel examining the unsolved murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan has effectively accused the Metropolitan Police of being involved in the killing.

The panel was finally able to publish its long-awaited report after weeks of stonewalling by Home Secretary, Priti Patel.

Patel had delayed publication on the grounds of “national security”, which gave an indication to the extreme sensitivity of the case, even at the highest reaches of the government.

Priti Patel under fire for delaying publication of report into UK’s biggest unsolved murder

Home Secretary Priti Patel is under fire for delaying a review into a three-decades old notorious murder on

Morgan, from Llanfrechfa near Cwmbran in south Wales, was killed with an axe outside the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham (south-east London) on March 10, 1987.  

Since his murder five police inquiries and an inquest have failed to get to the bottom of the notorious killing, largely owing to a nexus of corruption involving the Met Police, the media and politicians.

By all credible accounts, Morgan was on the cusp of exposing massive police corruption before being brutally murdered. The suspicion has always been that senior Met officers ordered the killing to remove the possibility of Morgan’s findings ever seeing the light of day.

The independent panel has given credence to these suspicions by asserting: "From the beginning, there were allegations that police officers were involved in the murder, and that corruption by police officers played a part in protecting the murderer(s) from being brought to justice".

The panel chided the Met for placing “misinformation” into the public domain as well as a failure “to acknowledge professional competence, individuals' venal behavior, and managerial and organizational failures".

"Concealing or denying failings, for the sake of the organization's public image, is dishonesty on the part of the organization for reputational benefit and constitutes a form of institutional corruption", the panel said.

The three-person panel led by Baroness Nuala O’Loan also criticized the Met for its shabby treatment of Morgan’s family, asserting that the family had “suffered grievously” as a consequence of a nearly 35-year failure to achieve justice.

For his part, Morgan’s brother, Alistair, who has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of his murdered sibling, has called on the Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick, to resign.

The Morgan family has issued the following statement: "We welcome the recognition that we - and the public at large - have been failed over the decades by a culture of corruption and cover-up in the Metropolitan Police, an institutionalized corruption that has permeated successive regimes in the Metropolitan Police and beyond to this day".

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