It was here in the Charminster area of Bournemouth
that a Korean student, Jong-Ok Shin, known as Oki, was stabbed.
This man, Omar Benguit, was convicted of her murder...
I'm struggling to believe that you didn't do this, OK?
There was no forensic evidence, no CCTV evidence.
I can't tell you and emphasise enough how fabricated this all was.
I am having serious concerns about the main prosecution witness' story.
Omar had an alibi.
Well, welcome to Scotland. Thanks.
Thanks for agreeing to come with me.
I'm on my way to meet a man
who could be the key to freeing Omar Benguit,
and I'm taking former murder detective Brian with me.
One of the biggest problems this guy has, Omar has,
is he doesn't know where he was the night of the murder. Right.
He has no alibi.
He throws so many stories to the police about where he was
and who he was with, and none of them turn out to be credible.
But one of the stories he tells them is that he was with a Jock
that night. A Scottish guy? A Scottish guy. Yeah.
And suddenly now, ten years later, over ten years later,
there's a guy come forward and he says that he was actually with Omar
on the night of the murder. Oh, right. That's pretty significant.
This guy, he's a friendly, he's willing to talk to us
so we're not going to have to work too hard at him,
but what would you be worried about, going in here?
I mean, the obvious question I'm asking
is what have you been doing for the last 15 years?
Why have you not come forward and said something before now?
We don't need you to do the nine-yard stare today with this guy.
It's good cop all the way.
LAUGHTER
I've been on the other end of you - I know!
But, I mean, you do it initially.
There's times and times when you can test it nicely but firmly.
You can do that. You're talking about somebody who's been...
Who's died, you know?
You've got to make sure the integrity of what you're presenting is real.
All right? Aye.
I brought Brian with me cos you said you wanted a kiss.
I thought, he's the man for you! HE LAUGHS
I was on this...
I'm not normally like that.
Brian McGregor is an alcoholic.
He spent time in jail with Omar before Oki was killed.
The two of them became friends.
How friendly were you with him?
I was not too bad. We were... Omar was a decent fellow.
Eh, but...
He's not the type of guy that would go out there and murder anybody.
No.
I know that for a fact, because that night
I bumped into him in the Bournemouth area.
Aye.
And he didnae have anywhere to stay.
So I went like, "Well, come up into my house."
I gave him one of my spare duvets
and I had money up on the top of my TV
and it was still there in the morning when I woke up.
The money and Omar?
Aye.
How did you find out Omar had been lifted for the murder?
On the street. So everybody was talking about it?
Aye, that's when I bumped into his brother
and his brother gave me his lawyer's phone number.
What do you say to the lawyer when you spoke to him at that time,
on the phone? I says to him at that time,
the night that murder happened Omar Benguit was with me.
And what did the lawyer say to that, once he'd picked himself up from the floor?
He asked me if I had any previous convictions.
What's your worst conviction?
An unlawful wounding. Did he not say to you, "Come into the office"?
No. Did he not say, "I need to talk to you"?
No.
But sure, the witnesses that gave evidence against Omar
weren't any better or any worse than you. I know.
Do you think you're an unreliable witness?
No, I don't, no, because I know for a fact that guy's not done that.
I'm surprised that lawyer didn't get in a car and hightail it
round the corner to wherever you were standing.
Did you tell him what had happened that night?
Er...I think so.
I just cannae remember, Brian. No?
I'm wondering, if you and Omar were quite close... Mm-hmm.
..I can't shake out of my head why you didn't go after the police
or phone that solicitor again.
From what that lawyer actually says to me at that time
on that phone call actually just put me right off it.
If it's your pal that's accused of murder,
would you not walk through walls to make sure you got your story told?
To be able to go and say to the police, "I need to tell you this, this is important"?
I think at the time, I didnae want to step on anybody's toes
or anything like that, like, you know what I mean?
This isn't stepping on anybody's toes, Brian,
this is helping your friend out.
Aye, but that's the way that sometimes my mind thinks.
Did anybody offer you anything, Brian,
to give Omar the alibi for that night?
No.
Nothing? Nothing at all.
Well, thoughts?
Very interesting, and my first reaction is I don't believe him.
I think it's quite contrived, I think it's inconsistent.
He doesn't ask the lawyer or demand to see the lawyer,
which we expect you would.
He doesn't go to the police for his pal, which we expect you would.
So, all of a sudden, all the list of against,
as to whether you would believe somebody or not,
is bigger than the list of things that make me actually believe him.
I could be completely wrong, I could have it wrong,
I just have a gut feeling.
He's a nice man, but he's clearly come through the wars, right?
I think if you've got somebody who's alcoholic, it certainly affects
your long-term memory, I think. Yeah.
I don't think he would...
..make a significant impact on getting Omar out. No.
If anything, I think it would detract. Yeah.
I still have big concerns about the main prosecution witness in this case.
BB was a heroin addict, and her account of the night Oki was killed
is full of inconsistencies.
Omar's sister claims the police framed him
by pushing other drug addicts into backing up parts of BB's story.
Nice to see you again.
Amy says she has spoken to some of these addicts herself.
I was out there looking for them, just trying to find some answers,
but slowly some of them started coming to me.
What were they telling you? What were they saying?
They were saying how they were coerced by the police,
how they were put up to it.
One of them lied in his statement to get a reduced sentence.
Some of them can't live with what they've done.
Some of them have told me what they did, they did it on the basis
that they never thought that Omar would actually be convicted for this.
You could look at it like they're telling the police
what they want to hear and they're telling you what they want to hear.
No, they're telling me the truth.
They don't have to, they don't have to come back and find me
and tell me, "Sorry, we made a mistake."
They don't have to do that, you know,
they've done what they've had to do, they could have just gone off.
But, no, they made sure that they came and found me.
I'm still sceptical about Amy's claims of police coercion.
But I'm going to investigate them by tracking down the people
Amy says she has spoken to.
The first person I find is John MacLeod.
He only testified against Omar at the first trial.
He was a heroin addict and is now in prison for robbery.
But my producer Georgia and I discover that he's talked about
Omar's case before.
I don't believe Omar did it, I really don't, genuinely.
The case is just based on a pack of lies from a few people
that were on drugs, myself being one of them.
If there was something there, if there was, like, a bit of blood
to connect him to it or there was a murder weapon found,
something that connected him to it, then fair enough,
but the words of just a few junkies who all had something to profit
from it? It's not right, man.
This is an interview that John gave to the BBC
in 2014 right after the appeal failed,
and it was in the archives, never used.
He's been writing to me from prison.
And he says that in his letters?
He's backing up everything he said.
He was with Omar the day after the murder.
All I know is I was with him a couple of hours after it happened.
He never mentioned anything to me.
He seemed fine and he was acting normal all day.
The police didn't believe that.
They were like, "We know you know about this. We know."
You know, "You must know," and all that.
I says, "Look, he's not told me nothing."
A few months later I was arrested for a robbery on jewellers,
and the police then came to see me and were like,
"Look, we can help you, give the judge a letter
if you give us a statement telling us what you know about Omar."
So, it's not my proudest thing I've ever done, but I jumped on that.
He told the police that he saw Omar with blood on his shoes
and that Omar was asking him for an alibi.
We see this.
Maybe six months after that, they came to me and was like,
"You've got to go to the Crown Court now and give evidence for this murder trial."
And they visited me in Guys Marsh Prison and I says, "Look, I'm not going."
They were like, "You need to go." I says, "I'm not going."
"Why are you not going?" I says, "Because it was a pack of lies,
"the statement I gave you." They go, "No, we don't believe you."
They said, "We can get you an HDC, Home Detention Curfew,
we can organise it like that, you must come and give evidence."
What he's detailing there in that interview, isn't...
..isn't that irregular.
Police offer deals to criminals all the time to get their cooperation.
That's not unheard of.
What I find more concerning is that he said,
even though he told the police straight up that he told them lies
to get a deal, they still wanted him to go to court
and they were still offering him incentives.
Even after he'd said that the whole thing was a pack of lies.
John's story shows police were prepared to put forward
unreliable witnesses who changed their accounts.
But it isn't evidence of Amy's claims that the police
were actually putting words in people's mouths.
Soon after, I find another witness Amy spoke to,
with a more interesting story to tell.
So, Natalie Stanton is someone we know knew Omar
through the sort of drug scene,
and she knew him for, like, a few months - the summer of 2002
before the murder.
Natalie did not testify against Omar in court, but Amy claims
the police encouraged her to paint a negative picture of Omar.
What did she say in her police statement?
She talks about her relationship with Omar,
and there's an incident that he's getting cross about having lost
a credit card.
So, what are they saying, that he's aggressive to women essentially?
Yeah, it goes on to say that "he's an arrogant man
"who, from my little dealing with him,
"has a problem communicating with women."
Good morning. Hi, how are you? Yes, not too bad, you?
Good. How's the dog? Yes, barking as usual.
Shall I go through? Yeah.
It's lovely out here.
Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? It is nice. Yeah.
How long have you been clean?
Over ten years now. Have you?
Yeah, yeah.
You've come a long way, haven't you? Yeah, yeah. From where you were.
Yeah, that was a nasty road, nasty path that I got myself into.
Natalie was picked up for questioning
several weeks after Omar's arrest.
Four cars just swooped in on me and they...
Police car, police got out,
and told me to get down on the floor, and I was like, "Oh, my God."
And then they put me in the car and took me to the police station
and said, "We're inquiring about the Omar murder,"
but before I went in the interview room, a police officer said to me,
"Have you got any drugs?"
And I said yes, it's in my top pocket and they said, "Right,
"We'll get rid of that," and he literally put it in the bin.
Did you feel encouraged to talk to them?
Yeah, I thought they're helping me so I've obviously got to help them.
The police had, you know, scared me that day
and I felt really intimidated by them,
cos there wasn't just one in that interview room, there was about four
and they were just all like, "Omar this and Omar that,"
and, you know, "What are you doing with a person like that?"
Do you think that the pressure was inappropriate?
Yes, definitely, definitely inappropriate.
They just wanted me to say nasty things about Omar
and untruthful things about Omar.
I remember I just kept saying to them, you know, "Omar's fine."
You know, I left him alone with my children,
and I think that's when they probably brought the children
into it, because they even said that the children will probably be
taken off you if you continue hanging about with people like this,
and people like Omar.
And to hear that from the police, that panicked me
and that worried me.
So maybe I did say some things that I shouldn't have said.
And so you made a statement that day? Yeah.
Is that your statement? Yes.
Is there anything in the statement that you feel wouldn't be there
had you not felt that little bit more intimidated or...?
They're making out that he was, like, really raising his voice at me
and that he went to go and hit me.
He never did that, never did that at all.
And I see here that the police make mention of a set of kitchen knives.
Yeah, I did state that, but I think that was put into my mouth,
if you know what I mean.
Why do you think that?
Because I don't remember any knives missing.
There was nothing wrong with Omar.
So you trusted him? Yeah. Trusted him fully. Really?
He was absolutely brilliant with the kids, and the kids loved him.
Why is it that it's upsetting you, Natalie?
It's just going back, isn't it?
That was a bad time in my life,
and I just feel so sorry for Omar.
I really do and I wish I'd done something before,
but if I can help now, I can.
Yeah, I'm sorry, it's just this whole day.
Yes, I know, it's a lot of pressure. Yeah.
Would you like to get a tissue, or have a little cigarette?
Can I have a ciggy break? Absolutely. Is that OK? Yeah.
It's a very troubling story,
but it's going to be difficult to prove that the police
did anything wrong here.
Natalie's memory from that day is shaky.
But I've found something else that I need to put to Natalie.
It's another statement that she signed for Omar's family,
and not the police.
It's an alibi for Omar.
It claims that Omar was with Natalie on the night that he was supposed to have murdered Oki.
What Natalie tells me will put me on a collision course
with Omar's family.
You're behaving in exactly the way that you condemned the police?
I don't work like that.
I'm just after the truth.