Police officers who shared crime scene photos of murdered sisters are jailed
Two police officers who took pictures of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman have been jailed.
The two women were killed in Wembley, north London, in a random attack by Danyal Hussein, 19, who had written a pledge in blood to a demon to kill women every six months, in order to win the lottery.
Pc Deniz Jaffer and Pc Jamie Lewis were assigned to guard the crime scene overnight after Ms Henry, 46, and Ms Smallman, 27, were found dead in bushes on June 7 last year.
Instead, they breached the cordon in Fryent Country Park to take ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unauthorised’ photographs of the bodies, which were then shared on WhatsApp.
Lewis even superimposed his face onto a picture with the victims in the background. He sent the doctored image to Jaffer, who forwarded it to a female officer at the scene.
Jaffer went on to show one of the photos to a male officer as they left the park and sent others to three friends on WhatsApp.
Lewis used ‘degrading and sexist’ language and also shared crime scene pictures with a WhatsApp group of 40-plus officers called the ‘A Team’.
On Monday, Judge Mark Lucraft QC rejected an appeal for the officers to be spared custody, jailing each of the men for two years and nine months.
The judge condemned their ‘appalling and inexplicable conduct’, saying they disregarded the victims’ privacy for ‘a cheap thrill’ or ‘some form of bragging rights’.
In victim impact statements, family members described the defendants as a ‘disgrace’ to the police family and to mankind.
The women’s mother, Mina Smallman, said the officers’ actions were a ‘betrayal of catastrophic proportions’ and a ‘sacrilegious act’.
She said: ‘Jaffer and Lewis callously and without any regard for our dead girls’ bodies committed, to my mind, a sacrilegious act.
‘We were told …the police officers whose task it was to protect and preserve the crime scene had, in fact, for their own amusement, took selfies, posing for pictures with our dead daughters.
‘We were horrified. I had never heard of anything so macabre.
‘Those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, they felt they would take photos of our murdered daughters. Those officers dehumanised our children.’
Lewis and Jaffer were attached to the Metropolitan Police’s North East command unit and were suspended from duty following their arrests on June 22 last year.
Jaffer, 47, of Hornchurch, east London, and Lewis, 33, from Colchester, Essex, pleaded guilty to misconduct in a public office.
Ms Smallman previously called on the Met to ‘get the rot out once and for all’.
Last month, a tribunal found the officers had committed gross misconduct.
Lewis was dismissed from the Met immediately and Jaffer would have been sacked too, had he not already quit the force.
In October, Hussein was jailed for life with a minimum term of 35 years for the murders.
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