Two London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) officers have admitted in court to taking inappropriate pictures of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, allegedly referring to the victims at the time of the incident as the “two dead birds”.
Suspended PC Jamie Lewis, 33, (L) and former PC Deniz Jaffer, 47, (R) who resigned from the Met, pleaded guilty at Old Bailey on Tuesday to misconduct in public office after they shared photographs from the June 2020 murder of Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, at a London park when they were supposed to be guarding the crime scene.
Mark Lucraft QC said that the London officers were “extremely likely” to face custodial prison sentences, according to The Guardian.
“These matters are extremely serious and you should be under no illusions when you return for sentence it is extremely likely you will receive custodial sentences, custodial sentences of some length for your conduct,” Judge Lucraft said.
PC Deniz Jaffer had taken pictures of the two women as their bodies lay where the murderer, Satanist Danyal Hussein, had left them in the bushes of Fryent Country Park in Wembley, northwest London.
Hussein, 19, was sentenced last week to a minimum of 35 years in prison for stabbing to death the two women in the park in June 2020 in an apparent sacrifice to a demon in exchange for winning the lottery.
Jaffer sent four pictures of the women to PC Lewis, who photoshopped his face into one of them, with the victims in the background. Jaffer shared other photos — not of Ms Henry or Miss Smallman — from the crime scene to a WhatsApp group of around 40 other officers called the “A-Team”. The incidents took place in the two weeks after the bodies were found.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charged the two officers following an investigation by the police watchdog the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).
The IOPC had said PC Lewis had “used degrading and sexist language to describe the victims”, with sources speaking to The Times claiming that officers had referred to Ms Henry and Miss Smallman as the “two dead birds”.
Jaffer and Lewis will be sentenced in December.
The watchdog also backed the claims of the women’s family that London police had failed to adequately search for the victims after they were reported missing, with their bodies only found two days after the murders when Miss Smallman’s boyfriend headed a civilian search for the women in the park and found the sisters’ remains.
Mina Smallman, the mother of the victims, said on Tuesday that Scotland Yard was “beyond hope”, calling for its senior figures to “get the rot out once and for all” and condemned Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick for her “shoddy way of behaving”, saying she had not contacted the family to sincerely apologise.
The convictions are the latest condemnations of policing culture at Scotland Yard after PC Wayne Couzens was sentenced in September to a whole-life term in prison for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard in March 2021.
Couzens, who was suspected in multiple instances of indecent exposure towards women, had abused his authority as a police officer to undertake a fake arrest of Miss Everard, allegedly using coronavirus lockdown regulations as the pretext for placing her in handcuffs and forcing her into his car.