The shadow of Danilo Restivo, already convicted in Italy for the killing of 16-year-old Elisa Claps in Potenza in 1993, looms behind another brutal femicide committed in the United Kingdom: that of a South Korean student named Jong-Ok Shin, stabbed to death in 2002 .
This is supported by a journalistic investigation carried out by the editorial staff of Panorama, an investigative and in-depth programme on the BBC, which questions the outcome of the investigations conducted by the local police into this latest crime, which resulted in the conviction of a certain Omar Benguit as the alleged killer .
Jong—known to friends as Oki—was killed in 2002 while walking home from a nightclub in Bournemouth, southern England. And Benguit, a drifter with drug problems and a history of knife attacks, was arrested shortly after the events by Dorset Police and ultimately convicted in 2005. The BBC now denounces the conviction, which alleges that the accused may have spent 23 years in prison as an innocent man .
The journalistic investigation examined images from a closed-circuit street surveillance camera —obtained by Panorama only recently—which appear to completely disprove any resemblance between Omar Benguit and the man identified as the killer. They also corroborate the resemblance to Restivo , who had fled to the Kingdom in 2002 (where four years later he would also be implicated in the murder of his neighbor, Heather Barnett), but who was ultimately cleared by a British court of any suspicion of involvement in the Jong case following Benguit's parallel conviction.
According to journalistic reconstructions, some detectives from Dorset Police and prosecutor's office investigators allegedly induced at least 13 witnesses to alter their statements —if not blatantly lie in court— in order to "frame" the defendant they had brought to trial . They even went so far as to work to discredit a potential alibi, as apparently confirmed by some telephone intercepts. A full-blown investigative deception, if the BBC is to be believed, tied to the desire to claim a successful investigation in a story that had caused a great stir in the media and in British society at the time. But also, presumably, to cover up the fiasco of the investigation into Restivo: he too had initially emerged as a potential suspect, but had not been subjected to adequate investigation.
(Unioneonline)