Police block Kevin Nunes murder probe report
Police have blocked the release of a key document that details failings by detectives in the botched Kevin Nunes' gangland murder investigation.
Staffordshire Police says publishing the report would "undermine the human rights" of the officers or any person involved and mentioned in the document.
The Shropshire Star requested the 73-page Costello Report into the conduct of Staffordshire Police's Sensitive Policing Unit under the Freedom of Information Act. The contents of the report, which was completed in February 2007, was never disclosed by police at the original murder trial of five men charged with Mr Nunes' murder on the Shropshire border later that year.
But four years after the men were found guilty and jailed for life, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions after the report came to light.
The Court of Appeal heard that the document contained details of detectives going to nightclubs and drinking alcohol with the prosecution's star witness Simeon Taylor.
It also documented an affair one of Taylor's handlers was having with the murder case's disclosure officers which could have led to evidence contamination.
The report also included details of an alleged theft of police funds committed by Taylor.
But it has never been made fully public.
Mr Nunes was a promising amateur footballer with Stafford Rangers and had been on the books of Tottenham Hotspur. The 20-year-old from Whitmore Reans in Wolverhampton was pistol-whipped and shot dead in a country lane in Pattingham in 2002.
South Staffordshire MP Gavin Williamson said today: "It is in the public interest and, one would have thought, the police's interest to reveal what happened. There is nothing to be gained by holding back this report. This was a sorry affair in which a young man lost his life and there was no justice because of police failings."
