‘Mr Asia’ trial Directions on key witness

Press, 24 June 1981, Page 5

‘Mr Asia’ trial Directions on key witness

NZPA > Lancaster The jury in the "Mr Asia” drugs and murder trial was given repeated warnings yesterday to think very carefully about evidence from a key prosecution witness, Allison Dine.

The warnings came from Mrs Justice Heilbron during the third day of her summing up in the 104-day-old hearing at Lancaster Crown Court. Dine, a former Auckland kindergarten teacher, has given evidence about alleged involvement in a drug smugling syndicte, which the prosecution says, had its original base in Australia.

She claimed that she was working for Alexander Sinclair, formerly known as Terry Clark.

Sinclair, aged 36, is one of 12 people facing charges after the death of a New Zealand drugs racketeer, Marty (“Mr Asia") Johnstone, whose handless body was found 20 -months ago in a flooded Lancashire quarry. The Crown says that he was killed and mutilated after short-changing an international drug syndicate of which he was a leading member.

If is further alleged that Sinclair was the organisation's "Mr Big."

He has denied the claim, and has pleaded not guilty to Johnstone’s murder and to conspiring to import drugs, but guilty to conspiring to supply them. Yesterday her Honour began dealing with Dines evi-

dence — linking it with tht t of two other alleged syndicate workers, Kay Reynolds and Caroline Calder — in what she called "Dine Reynolds and Calder saga.” She compared part of Dine's evidence about an alleged herein run in 1975 with an apparently conflicting account which Reynolds had given the Court. "It will be one of many irregularities you will have to consider in the evidence of these two girls,” she said.

She contrasted the women's evidence about another trip and asked: “Are they deliberately lying or have they got truly muddled up about one out of a very large number of trips?” Later she asked the jury to consider whether Dine, who said she had had an affair at one stage with Sinclair, “considered herself a woman scorned.”

She detailed further specific parts of her evidence and asked the jury to decide whether she ,was telling a pack of lies — an accusation l made earlier by Sinclair’s " defence counsel.

Her Honour has so far been speaking to the jury for 15 hours.

Her summing up is the last major address which jury members will hear before what she has described as their most imprtant task —

retiring to consider their verdicts.

Her address is expected to last several more days.