The Metropolitan Police has discovered, locked in an old cabinet, more than 150 documents that should have been disclosed to inquiries of its disastrous, failed investigations into the axe murder of a private investigator.
A government-ordered independent panel that examined the notorious case two years ago accused the force of “institutional corruption” and accused then Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick, an assistant commissioner at the time of the 1987 murder, of obstructing it – refusing to provide information from a key database and “limiting access to the most sensitive information”.
The Met said in a statement it had found the documents locked in a cabinet that had not been used for several years.
The force moved its headquarters, New Scotland Yard, seven years ago.
None of the documents related to the murder investigations.
It said 95 of them should have been disclosed to the panel and another 71 to His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, which carried out its own probe into the investigation failures.
Read more: Metropolitan Police’s approach to tackling police corruption not fit for purpose, watchdog finds
The force said it had apologised to the family of Mr Morgan, who was found with an axe in his head in the car park of a south London pub in 1987 near where he was a partner in Southern Investigations.
It was rumoured he was about to expose corruption at Scotland Yard.
It’s a case that has dogged the force ever since, with four failed murder investigations, several smaller queries and two failed prosecutions, with accusations of police corruption, incompetence and cover-up.
The officer who ran the first police investigation later took Mr Morgan’s job at the detective agency.
Assistant Commissioner Barbara Gray said: “We fully acknowledge how unacceptable and deeply regrettable this situation is. We are working to understand what has taken place and any impact. We apologise to the family of Daniel Morgan and to the panel.
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“The documents were found in January and an assessment started in February. Some of the material is relevant to the work of DMIP and a subsequent inspection by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS).
“HMICFRS, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime and the Home Office have been informed.”
In a statement, Mr Morgan’s family said they were “not surprised” by the news.
“We, the family of Daniel Morgan, are not surprised by this latest revelation concerning the Met and its handling of this whole sorry saga over the 36 years since Daniel’s murder in March 1987,” the statement said.
The family said there has been “no explanation” for why it took the Met four months to tell them about the documents.
“We were informed last night – by way of a letter from Assistant Commissioner Barbara Gray – that these documents had been ‘stored in a locked cabinet at New Scotland Yard following a handover between senior officers in 2014’ and accessed only when ‘the Met forced entry into this secure storage’ in January 2023,” the statement said.
“No explanation has been forthcoming as to why it took the Met over four months to inform us of this development. In the circumstances, we consider we are entitled to ask whether the information has come to light only because, as we understand it, the media had already got hold of the story.
“What we see here is precisely the kind of conduct that was identified as institutional corruption in the Panel’s June 2021 report; it appears that the Met’s first objective remains to protect itself, concealing its failings for the sake of its public image and reputational benefit.”
