Cover-up by police?

Press, 9 April 1980, Page 6

Cover-up by police?

NZPA London A key witness in the inquiry into the death of the New Zealand teacher, Blair Peach, has asserted that a policeman was allowed to grow a beard before taking part in an identification parade. Amanda Leon, a friend of Mr Peach, who was with him at the Southall riot almost a year ago, said at a National Union of Teachers conference on Monday that the beard had made identification virtually impossible. Miss Leon, aged 33, a Southwark teacher, said: “At one of the three identity parades I attended the officer in charge said, ‘I advise you the suspect is wearing a beard. On the day in question

he was not’. “I looked down the line of eight or 10 men and saw they were all wearing beards. It is difficult enough to identify someone you only saw when you were terrified out of your wits.”

The inability of any of thei witnesses who have alleged they saw Mr Peach struck down by uniformed policemen to identify any individual attacker was given as a major reason for last year’s decision against laying any criminal charges against suspects. Scotland Yard declined to comment on Miss Leon’s allegations of a deliberate police cover-up. The inquest into Mr Peach’s death will reopen before a jury later this month, a year and a week after he died in the clash between anti-Nazi demonstrators and the police in Southall in an attempt to control a march by the National Front through the largely Asian

suburb. Miss Leon was one of the first persons to give evidence to the inquest when it originally opened last .Otcober, when she was taxed by counsel representing the police, with lying to the

Coroner’s Court, an accusal tion she denied.

“I believe they know whd did it,” she told reporters. She believed that a publid inquiry would be a first step in bringing the person re< sponsible to trial. The maid thing, however, would -ba “public opposition to thd cover-up which is going on.’ 1

Miss Leon told the confen ence that Mr Peach had beeii killed by a weapon not norm* ally issued to the police. “We know such non-reguf lation weapons, including lead-filled rubber instru4 merits, had been found in thd lockers of the Special Patrol policemen in the headquarri ers in London,” she said.

“We know also that a pub 4 lie inquiry would make thid clear.”

For the union’s Mr John Perry said thd N.U.T. was still committed to a public inquiry into the death of one of its

The Peach inquest will re* sume ; in London on April 28,