A police officer jailed for sharing photos from the murder scene where two sisters lay stabbed, tried to impress his friends by using racist language and claiming police covered up an attack on Asian men.
The private messages on WhatsApp from the former Metropolitan police constable Deniz Jaffer were discovered after he was arrested last June by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). He and fellow PC Jamie Lewis were ordered to guard the scene where the bodies of where Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were discovered in north London. Instead, they took photos, some showing the bodies, and shared them in two WhatsApp groups, calling the victims “dead birds”.
Both men were jailed last week for two years and nine months after admitting misconduct in public office. The sisters’ mother said Jaffer and Lewis had dehumanised her daughters for their own amusement by taking and sharing photos of them.
Sources confirmed that an investigationof Jaffer’s phone after his arrest found he had used racist language in a message in which he bragged to friends about a cover-up of an attack on Asian men by white men. Investigators believe the cover-up allegation was most likely false and in interview he said he made it up, sources said.
In a message on 13 June 2020, days after he took and shared the photos, Jaffer wrote on a WhatsApp chat that five Asian men, whom he referred to using a racially abusive term, had been attacked.
In leaked extract of an IOPC report, which was first quoted by the Times, Jaffer wrote: “Three white fellas arrested for ABH [actual bodily harm] but we have had a chat off the record.
“We will release them under investigation and close it later saying victim unwilling without contacting the P*****.”
That aspect was investigated by the Met. In a statement the force said it had no record of the incident nor any arrests: “The allegations relating to the WhatsApp message from June 13 2020 were investigated by the IOPC and MPS. The IOPC encompassed the derogatory racial references within their investigation of PC Jaffer.
“The Met’s directorate of professional standards (DPS) investigated the reference to the alleged incident in the message sent by Jaffer but nothing was found to corroborate the arrests or that the incident had happened.”
Jaffer had claimed the group he sent the message to were people he knew and trusted and contained holiday friends.
Jaffer, 47, joined the Met in March 2018 and had just over two years service when he took four photos of Henry and Smallman when he was supposed to be guarding them. He resigned on 18 August 2021, and was sacked by a tribunal in November and barred from being a police officer for life.
Before joining the Met Jaffer worked as a financial trader for 20 years and had claimed being a police officer was a lifelong dream.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/dec/13/met-pc-who-shared-photos-of-dead-sisters-used-racist-language-in-cover-up-boast-deniz-jaffer
