Extradited Read Online Free PDF Page B

sign statements implicating me in the crime, five friends of Jonathan Hiles had also signed statements with the Zante police. Three of them, Mark O’Gorman, Christopher Paglionico and Lee Burgess had all signed statements that were word-for-word identical, describing the events that led up to the attack. These statements describe the assailant as having a muscular build with short, dark brown hair.
    Although I have always had short, brown hair, I wasn’t muscular at all – I was very chubby. The statements did not describe my appearance. Secondly, these statements claimed to be taken by different officers, on different days, at completely different times. The statements were word-for-word identical, so it would be highly improbable for that to be true.
    Another of Hiles’s friends, Robert Hares, admitted that he did not see the punch. Yet another, Jason Mordecai, signed a statement describing the perpetrator as a tall, blond male with a heavy northern English accent who had many spots on his face.
    As soon as my friends Chris and Charlie were forced to signstatements implicating me as the assailant, all five of Jonathan Hiles’s friends signed additional statements for the Zante police investigation. These five statements were, again, word-for-word identical, also claiming to be taken by different police officers at different times. George translated this statement for us. It said:
    I identified with complete certainty and I am absolutely sure that the individual shown in about the middle of the photograph, who has a slightly artistic-looking goatee, is the perpetrator who caused the fatal bodily injury to my friend. At this point I wish to point out that the perpetrator had shaved off his goatee on the day of the incident and had left only slightly long sideburns.
    My facial hair was extremely distinctive and I could prove that I’d never shaved it off. There were pictures from my sister’s graduation, which had been taken two days after I’d returned from Zante, and my facial hair was far too thick to have grown back after being shaved on the day of the alleged attack.
    George told us that the police mentioned there being CCTV footage showing me as the attacker – but there was no sign of it in the case file. This would have been amazing, as CCTV data would have shown a different person throwing the punch. But George feared that it didn’t even exist.
    The investigation was a mishmash of unreliable information and it was clear that not all of the content had come out of the individuals’ mouths. The family of the victim had lost their son in a violent attack and were entitled to a competent investigation, but this wasn’t an investigation at all, it was a witch-hunt. The officers had beaten two eighteen-year-old boys, forced them to sign something that was untrue and then fabricated statements to implicate a random man from a photograph – one that wasn’t even taken on the same night.

5
----
THE ARGUMENT
----
    W e were silent the whole journey home; no one spoke. My angry thoughts drowned out the odd hiss of the train’s breaks and the rumbling sound of the Piccadilly line’s track. I was trying to make sense of what I’d just discovered, but couldn’t help repeating the word ‘bastards’ in my mind. Sotiris Siatis, Angelos Polizos and Dimitris Angeloudis, those were the police officers’ names. Farmers with police badges , I thought. I pictured stereotypical fat, hairy Greek men wearing police uniforms with their shirts unbuttoned, revealing full chests of hair and gold crucifixes – sitting at their desks with a cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, writing statements that didn’t come out of the mouths of the people who signed them. How could they not think about the life they were affecting? The lives they were affecting? Did they think they could get away with concocting these statements? Or did they believe that they beat the truth out of Chris and Charlie, so fabricating the evidence made