Sister of man wrongly jailed for Jill Dando’s murder calls for the investigation to be reviewed by another force after Sir Mark Rowley dismisses evidence implicating the Serbian Security Services
The Jill Dando murder case should be handed to an outside police force, the sister of a man wrongly convicted of her murder has said.
Michelle Bates was speaking after the Metropolitan Police dismissed an investigation by the Daily Mirror indicating that Jill was the victim of a Serbian state-sponsored attack. Met chief Sir Mark Rowley said on Tuesday that he didn’t know the detail of our reporting but implied it did not offer any new leads. It comes after Rowley last year dismissed our long-running probe as “entertaining news copy” and “good media headlines”. The Met has repeatedly refused to follow up evidence that Jill was shot dead on April 26, 1999, because of an appeal she had fronted for Kosovo.
Nearly a year later, detectives homed in on Barry George, a local man with severe learning difficulties. George, now 65, spent eight years in jail for murder but was cleared in 2008 after a retrial. His sister Michelle, 69, said on Tuesday: “I think we always, as a family, felt the Met would not reopen it because it suits them if Barry still doesn’t look quite innocent enough.
“An outside force should review this case and take the lens away from Barry and look at what’s left – and there is clearly plenty left to look at. We have been calling for this case to be reopened since the very day Barry was released in 2008, I even said it outside the Old Bailey at the time, to find out who actually killed Jill.
“It’s incredibly frustrating that the Met is not following up on potential new leads. Whenever we have spoken of seeking justice for Barry we have always said, and still do say, that we also want it for Jill and her family.”
Asked if his officers would look at the Mirror’s findings, Rowley told Nick Ferrari on LBC radio on Tuesday: “If there was genuinely new evidence that made a case solvable on any historic murder we will look into it.” Jill’s case was moved to inactive status in 2014 and has not been subject to a major review since.
Detectives had previously dismissed the possibility of her being the victim of the Serbian Security Services. Officers have never visited the country to investigate. Jill, 37, was ambushed from behind as she was about to open her front door, forced to the ground and killed with one bullet to the back of her skull fired at close range.
Within hours of her murder in Fulham, west London, the BBC took a call claiming it was in response to the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia. Last year we named Serbian assassin Milorad Ulemek publicly for the first time in connection with Jill’s murder after a facial comparison expert said he was identical to a CCTV image of a man who is still wanted.
And a key witness told us that she was certain she had seen the killer near to the murder scene on the morning of April 26, 1999. Ulemek, now 57 and serving 40 years in a Serbian jail, led a unit of hitmen and plotted assassinations for late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
In a major update last April we revealed a second key witness said Ulemek looked like a man he saw sprinting near Jill’s home. We also told how Ulemek’s spy boss has admitted one of his team carried out an attack in Europe at around the time of the murder.
Dragan Filipovic was a major in the Serbian security services when he admitted masterminding a “secret reprisal action” in the spring of 1999 that caused “great confusion in Europe”. In a Disasters Emergency Committee appeal on April 6, Jill called Kosovo a “former Yugoslavian region”, which would have enraged ultra-nationalist Filipovic.
In his 2008 book Anatomy of the Globalist Stink, he rails against non-governmental organisations which he says were part of a “special war” to promote the interests of the West. Jill’s BBC appeal, on behalf of large UK NGOs, potentially made her a legitimate target in Filipovic’s warped view.
Filipovic said the secret operations were halted when the bombing ended in June 1999, adding: “In the meantime, one of the previously initiated actions… was successfully implemented, which caused “great confusion in Europe”. “
It is implied the “radical action” was a state-sponsored assassination . In the light of our investigation, MPs have called for the case to be reopened and the top barrister who prosecuted Milosevic for war crimes says Ulemek should be investigated.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said: “We are aware of recent reporting, which has been reviewed but has not identified any fresh lines of enquiry, and which, therefore, requires no further police action. No unsolved murder case is ever closed, and realistic lines of enquiry will be assessed as they are brought to light.”