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John Smith says the former deputy chief constable is seriously mistaken.

This is from the Sunday Times story on 24 April 2016:

'When Beck made his first comment about Janner in court in 1991, no one was more surprised than the police. They
had interviewed about 400 people, yet none of them had mentioned Janner.

'“Not one. Nothing at all,” said Tony Butler, former deputy chief constable of Leicestershire police. “We had started investigating Beck in 1988, and it is a long time ago now, but as far as I can recall, it wasn’t until he said that in court that anyone mentioned Janner.”'

That's certainly inconsistent with those extracts from the Henriques report. Beck's outburst was on 27 February 1991 and the first of these statements was made by the female resident about nine months earlier. The second was nearly four weeks before Beck's outburst. Thank you for pointing this out.

Butler will have to speak for himself. But it's possible that what he meant was that nobody had told the police they had been assaulted by Janner. The statements by this witness seem to be hearsay as far as Janner is concerned.

As for the Kirkwood report, I don't find it surprising that he gave no publicity to Janner's testimony or the allegations against him. As I said in the piece, it was not Kirkwood’s job to decide whether the allegations against Janner were true.

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