Monday 7 October 2019

Operation Midland

Operation Midland was a British police investigation into alleged abuse, conducted by the Metropolitan Police in London from November 2014 to March 2016. The operation focused on the investigation of several high profile British politicians, military officers and heads of security over alleged claims of child sexual abuse and homicide, against a number of high profile British citizens, consisting of politicians, military chiefs and heads of security. The eighteen month operation failed to find sufficient evidence to support the claims, and an inquiry into the police investigation afterwards concluded that the people involved had been falsely accused, with detectives and officers having committed several errors in the course of their work.

The Henriques report was initially released heavily redacted. A fuller version of it will be released today and will say the issue of police allegedly misleading a judge to gain search warrants as they investigated prominent figures was the most serious police error of the 43 he identified during his inquiry. Police omitted to tell the court of inconsistencies in the account of the sole witness they were basing their investigation on.

The scathing report accuses Britain's biggest police force of being too ready to believe the extraordinary claims of fantasist Carl Beech and failing to identify the glaring and obvious inconsistencies in his extraordinary allegations. In 2014, Beech told senior detectives that he had been abused by a group including Sir Edward Heath, the former Prime Minister, Lord Brittain, the former Home Secretary, Lord Bramall the former head of the army and Harvey Proctor MP.

The report says there were numerous opportunities to spot his lies in the early stages of the inquiry and shut down the case.

In response, Scotland Yard's deputy commissioner Sir Stephen House admitted mistakes were made but said the force does not agree with everything Sir Richard wrote in his report, however most if not all of those concerned are either retired or dead.

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