ON THE DAY that Amazon Prime Video launches it’s must see three part documentary “The Fake Sheikh” we can exclusively reveal that in court documents shown to Politicalite that alleges that both the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service that stated that Mazher Mahmood could not and should not be considered a witness of truth in any further legal proceedings in 1994 - and yet despite this, convictions based on his evidence and lies continued until the collapse of the 2014 Drugs trial of British Pop Star Tulisa Contostavlos.
Indeed, we can confirm that during disclosure in the Phone Hacking High Court Cases, amongst documents found to be in possession of News Group Newspapers were documents where the MET Police and Crown Prosecution Service are communicating with each other about.
the 1994 collapsed trial (mentioned in the grounds of appeal of Alex Smith) based on a 1992 Fake Sheikh Sting Story. The MET Police basically say to CPS and both agree with each other that HE COULD NOT & SHOULD NOT ever be relied on as a witness of truth again.
And yet they continued to rely on his fabricated evidence until the collapse of the Drugs Trial of Pop Star & Former X-Factor Judge Tulisa Contostavlos in July 2014 which finally led to The Fake Sheikh being charged, convicted & jailed for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice after he tampered with evidence being used in his sting against Tulisa.
This means that all convictions obtained based on the lies, dishonesty and fabricated or edited evidence supplied by Mazher Mahmood and his team from 1994 onwards should all now be considered unsafe and most likely overturned as never did the Police or CPS at the time disclose these facts to any of his victims and never have they done so since, despite issuing disclosure packs to many fake sheikh victims following the collapse of the 2014 Tulisa Contostavlos drugs trial where Judge Alistair McCreath caught Mahmood Lying and ended the trial.
Indeed the year after Hypnotist Jonathan Royle was jailed in 1999, another Fake Sheikh sting this time on Rhodri Giggs (brother of the famous footballer) ended in a not guilty verdict, and the judge suggested that the prosecutors should be investigating Mahmood instead, for supplying drugs after the case was dropped because prosecutors decided they could no longer rely on the recorded evidence of Mahmood.
During the Leveson Inquiry The Fake Sheikh famously boasted that he had never been arrested for dealing drugs or any other activities that are clearly illegal under normal circumstances during the course of his investigations for the News of the World.
Whilst that may indeed be true, it omits to mention that various Judges & Legal Representatives have over the years suggested that Mahmood should be investigated by the Crown Prosecution Service for his activities as on many occasions it has seemed that he did not have a true public interest justification for doing such things.
It is interesting to note that in the 1999 case of Hypnotist Royle, whilst sentencing him, the Judge acknowledged that “this is not an ordinary case” and along the way it was also acknowledged as is confirmed by the Manchester Evening News report of 2nd March 1999 that Alex always knew who Mahmood was and his only intentions were to generate publicity.
The question is, why if (as he was) Mahmood was afforded so called “journalistic license” or “lawful excuse” for buying alleged counterfeit coins in this case was Alex Smith not also afforded the same “journalistic license” or “lawful excuse” as his intentions to expose Mahmood’s dishonesty and lies were and are most certainly fully in the public interest?
Is it because Mahmood & his News Group superiors like Rebekah Brooks are so well connected to high-ranking officials including Politicians & The Police?
Rebekah Brooks famously stated during Part One of the British Governments Leveson Inquiry into Media Ethics that she & her organisation had paid Police Officers in the past for stories & information (which is Illegal) & The Fake Sheikh once told a Police Inquiry “I’ve got bent police officers that are witnesses.” yet the police did not deem it necessary to follow this up.
During the 1999 trial of Lord Hardwicke, the jury were so shocked about the sting set up by Mahmood, that they wrote a note to the judge, Timothy Pontius, “Had we been allowed to take the extreme provocation into account we would undoubtedly have reached a different verdict,” they said.
The judge gave a suspended sentence and said to Hardwicke: “Were it not for that elaborate sting you would not, I accept, have committed these particular offences…. Journalists in general, and those involved in this case in particular, should carefully examine and consider their approach to investigations where it involves no police participation, or indeed until after the trap has been sprung and the story reported in the press.”
Similar concerns to these were raised by many of the legal teams of the Fake Sheikhs victims & even by some Judges over the decades he ruined lives with his dishonesty & often arguably wholly illegal actions.
In June 2003, when one of the biggest Fake Sheikh stories, about the plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham, collapsed Judge Simon Smith, in a hearing at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court, said he was referring the newspaper to the Attorney General. Defence lawyers claimed it had shown “complete contempt for the administration of justice”. The judge responded:
“I am minded to refer the whole of this matter to the Attorney General to consider the temptations which money being offered in return for stories, in particular about celebrities, gives rise to and the way in which newspaper investigations may have a detrimental effect on ultimate court proceeding.”
In September 2003 a former associate of Mahmood’s, Florim Gashi, who had been involved in the collapsed Beckham kidnap trial, was alleging all kinds of wrong doing in the various stings he’d been involved in. This prompted an initial police inquiry into Mahmood, Operation Canopus which lasted until September 2005.
So between 2003 and 2005, the News of the World knew that Mazher Mahmood’s stories had been referred to the Attorney General.
Yet, in November 2003, Mazher Mahmood claims in his autobiography, he was invited to drinks with the then Met Commissioner, Lord Stevens, and Andy Coulson, then News of the World editor.
This was around the time one of Mahmood’s most headlined story, the alleged attempted kidnap of Victoria Beckham, collapsed.
Further as highlighted in a 2020 Channel 4 Documentary “Murder in the Car Park” about The Daniel Morgan Murder which is Britain’s most investigated but as yet unsolved murder, Mazher Mahmood & The News of the World are implicated in interfering with the Police Investigation and indeed Mahmood’s name appears several times in the Report published by the Daniel Morgan Murder Inquiry committee published in June 2021.
In June 2023 it was reported by the majority of the British Mainstream Media that the Metropolitan Police Service in London, England were to reportedly pay the family of the Late Daniel Morgan £2 million Pounds compensation over the ‘corrupt’ murder investigation.
It raises the question of If Scotland Yard were aware Mahmood had damaging and incriminating evidence against Met police officers, was that the reason they decided to drop one of their past investigations into him – in layman’s term; like the CPS, is Scotland Yard compromised by Mahmood too?
Our investigations also revealed that despite numerous Fake Sheikh victims asserting that their drinks had been spiked (as reported over the past few days by Politicalite) and that covert recordings made by Mahmood & his team had been heavily edited to present things out of context at no time did the Police or Crown Prosecution Service inform victims as per their legal duty of disclosure that they had known about Mahmood’s unreliability as a witness since 1994 or that they had known from at least 1999 (via the collapsed Rhodri Giggs case) that Mahmood’s heavily edited recordings could not be relied upon either.
The first part of the Leveson inquiry avoided looking too closely at the relationship between the Metropolitan police and Rupert Murdoch’s News International – that was intended for part two of the inquiry, a part two that the Conservative Government have cancelled and swept under the carpet and which every British Citizen who values truth & justice would be wise to contact their Local MP about asking them to lobby Parliament to reinstate Part 2 of the inquiry.
One of the questions Part 2 of the Leveson inquiry could perhaps help answer is, why did the Police & Crown Prosecution Service continue helping Mazher Mahmood & his Rupert Murdoch backed News of the World & then Sun on Sunday team to continue ruining peoples life’s based on many occasions down to nothing more than fabricated evidence & victims who were entrapped, manipulated, drugged to make them more suggestible & compliant and then routinely lied about in the stories of “The King of Sting” Mazher Mahmood.
Also we feel that a full public inquiry into all past convictions obtained as a result of Mahmood’s Stories should be carried out as a matter of urgency especially when you consider that Hypnotist Alex Smith has shown us documents illustrating that in the alleged Counterfeit Coins Sting Story which The News of the World ran on him it took Mahmood nine days from getting the coins until he handed them over to the Police and there is absolutely no proof of the safety of the chain of evidence during those 9 days so how do we even know they were the same coins?
Indeed documents shown on Alex’s blog www.CircusoftheMind.net campaigning for justice in these matters also illustrate that Mahmood tampered with evidence in his case (as it seems he has done in many past cases) as despite the story stating that on their first meeting Alex handed him three £1 coins and then at a later meeting handed over 1,000 coins thus making a grand total of 1003 coins handed over between two meetings, the Police & Court records related to his 1999 court case only make mention of 3 coins for the first meeting and then 996 or 997 coins at most for the second.
Where exactly did the other 3 coins vanish to?
Well Alex thinks he can answer that, “You see when Mahmood mentioned counterfeit coins, I played along and acted the part and said I could indeed obtain such (despite not having a clue where to get them until one of his associates gave me this information) and so I just handed him three pound coins from my pocket these being genuine pound coins which I handed over pretending them to be examples of the fake coins that as I acted my part in my quest to expose his dishonesty (see Politicalite story of 23rd September 2023) I was falsely claiming I could obtain.”
“In other words I fully believe that Mahmood had to “lose” the 3 coins from the first meeting and not hand them to the police as they were indeed genuine and would have raised far too many questions about his activities”
Alex concluded:
“Ironically in recent years I have, following a GDPR request to The Royal Mint discovered that although they do indeed keep records and still have records from circa 1998/1999 in relation to coins sent to them for forensic examination and validation as either genuine or counterfeit, it seems that they do not have any records connected to my name, the Police, CPS, News of the World or the Fake Sheikh suggesting that the alleged “Fake coins” in my case were never forensically tested and/or confirmed as such and that rather the word of a serial liar that both the MET Police and CPS knew from at least 1994 could & should not be trusted was indeed for no apparently logical reason trusted without question”
Following the collapse of the 2014 Tulisa Drugs Trial many high ranking individuals spoke out publicly in the media about The Fake Sheikh, these comments included:
“It is as we have long suspected that the Met knew and repressed information about corrupt relationships between their officers, employees of The News of the World and Southern Investigations. This information was deliberately repressed by the Metropolitan police and should have been disclosed to those representing defendants in the so called “stings” orchestrated by Mazher Mahmood. It is information which should be immediately disclosed to those lawyers advising relevant convicted individuals whose cases are now before the CCRC, and the Daniel Morgan Investigation Panel. - Siobhain Egan – Lewis Nedas Law
“People who have been locked up in the past are now able to say there is compelling evidence that this man was prepared to lie on oath in order to secure a wrongful conviction, so there’s now a platform for others to come forward and say ‘the same thing happened to us.’” - Jeremey Dein QC
There were “strong grounds for believing that the underlying purpose of these lies was to conceal the fact that he (Mazher Mahmood) had been manipulating the evidence in this case” by getting another witness to change his account”
Judge Alistair McCreath told the jury.
“Mahmood has now been exposed by my lawyers openly lying to the judge and jury. These lies were told to stop crucial evidence going before the jury.” She added: “Thankfully, the lies have been uncovered and justice has been done.”
Tulisa Constostavlos
“Curiously, he’s (Mazher Mahmood) never been charged with the illegal purchase of cocaine, although there are no legal grounds on which he can do this to perpetrate a sting.”
Peter Burden – Author of Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings
“I am responsible for innocent people going to jail. I tricked them, (to help Mazher Mahmood) and I’m ashamed. It’s time to tell the truth.” Florim Gashi – Former Colleague of the Fake Sheikh
“We’ve had the case of Mazher Mahmood, the ‘fake sheikh’ who perverted the course of justice to secure his ’scoops’ and left scores of previous convictions unsafe.”
Tom Watson – Labour MP
“One is mindful about the fact there is little regulation on undercover newspaper work and citizen investigators which perhaps needs to be looked into.”
Nazir Afzal – Former Chief of CPS in Northwest
The other thing you might want to look at though is the PCC code: “Clandestine devices and subterfuge. The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices or by intercepting private or mobile calls, messages or emails…” etcetera, etcetera. And of course it goes on to say: “… unless there’s a clear public interest.”
Alistair Campbell – MP
“The fact that somebody who has been accused by a judge of apparently not telling the truth may be instrumental in those convictions would certainly be a reason to look at those convictions again and to examine them to see whether they are safe,” (Goldsmith told the BBC Fake Sheikh Exposed Panorama Documentary)
Lord Peter Henry Goldsmith – Former Attorney General
“I will first deal with unlawful and improper conduct within News International and other newspaper organisations. The Conviction of Mazher Mahmood also raises issues of an entirely different species of unlawful and improper conduct”
Sir Brian Leveson QC
“The CPS special prosecution team, as it was then, dealt exclusively with these prosecutions and in my view did not seek to test the weight or the veracity of the evidence.” “As I say, there was a certain MO Mahmood would employ. The same assertions were made by reputable defence teams time and again to the CPS, which were ignored.” “You also have the Met Police. We now know there were internal investigations by the anticorruption team at New Scotland Yard into Mahmood’s relationships with serving police officers.” - Siobhain Egan – Lewis Nedas Law
“Over the last 25 years, innumerable lives have been ruined by the dishonest actions of Mazher Mahmood. People have lost their livelihoods, their homes and relationships, with some spending time in prison.” “When the public used to read “Fake Sheikh” articles in British newspapers, they would know there was a criminal at the heart of the story. Until now, readers didn’t realise that the criminal was the “Fake Sheikh” himself.”
MARK LEWIS – Lawyer
“The real scandal in this case is that Mahmood was allowed to operate as a wholly unregulated police force, ‘investigating’ crimes without the safeguards which apply to the police. As a journalist, he was able to rely on unnamed ‘sources’ and was not required to give full disclosure of his investigation to the defence. As Tulisa’s defence lawyers, we were prevented from properly testing the strength of his evidence.” “It was obvious from the outset that Tulisa should never have had to go to court. If Mahmood’s evidence had been properly stress tested instead of accepted wholesale by the CPS, we are confident it would have come to the same conclusion.”
Ben Rose – Hickman & Rose Solicitors
“Red flags were raised about the reliability of Mazher Mahmood’s stings over decades but the police ignored them.”
Dr. Evan Harris
“It appears perverse that, while the law protects against the state causing citizens to commit illegal acts, it does not protect against private parties doing the same thing, where often the participation of the private ‘entrapper’ goes beyond that which would be deemed appropriate by law enforcement officers. Many newspapers stings involve an expensive and targeted campaign on one individual, based on limited or no intelligence, where the inducement is persistent and the primary incentive is to sell newspapers, not to prevent crime.” David Sleight – Kingsley Napsley Solicitors
“Mahmood’s methods debase journalism. They often amount to entrapment and, on occasion, appear to involve the use of agents provocateurs. People have been encouraged to commit crimes they would not otherwise have conceived. As if that wasn’t enough, the public interest justification advanced for such activities by the NoW is almost always highly debatable.” – Professor Roy Greenslade – Journalist “Panorama increases the strength of the case considerably for a new inquiry… There is a severe question mark over over the tactics he [Mahmood] used… We are dealing with convictions which may not have been properly obtained.”
John Whittingdale MP
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