R v Alkhader Qasem

The applicant is now 17. I shall call him Qasem. On 6 November 2024, following a trial in the Crown Court at Manchester (Minshull Street), before Ellenbogen J ("the judge") and a jury, he was convicted of murder. On 19 December 2024 he was sentenced to detention during His Majesty's Pleasure, with a minimum term of 14 years and 113 days. He renews his application for permission to appeal against that sentence following refusal by the single judge. We are grateful to Mr Ford KC for his attendance this morning and for his clear, focused and realistic submissions.

On the afternoon of 4 April 2024, Qasem and his co-accused Mia went to Raby Street in the Moss Side area of Manchester to visit a friend at his family home. Shortly after their arrival they encountered 17-year-old Prince Walker-Ayemi and his friend Ricardo Sewell in the street. Prince challenged Qasem before forcefully punching him two or three times in an unprovoked attack.

Qasem and Mia did not seek refuge in the friend's house but instead they moved from the pavement to the road, squared up to Prince and Ricardo and gave chase when they ran away. The pursuit culminated in a different location when Qasem stabbed Prince three times. Two of the wounds, one to his heart and the other to the femoral artery in his right thigh, proved fatal.

Some of the events which preceded and followed the stabbing were captured on CCTV cameras and were witnessed by a passerby, Ben Rogers. Amongst other things, Mr Rogers said that he had seen Qasem take out a silver object 4 inches in length from the waistband of his trousers. He was able to pick out Qasem because of all of the young men involved in this incident Qasem was wearing a distinctive light grey tracksuit top and bottoms. It was the Crown's case that the knife which Mr Rogers saw was the knife which Qasem used to kill Prince. The culmination of the chase and the murder itself were not witnessed. The fatal wounds were inflicted in a location which was not covered by CCTV.

Qasem's defence was that the knife that he had used had belonged to Prince and was not his own. He said that he had picked it up when Prince dropped it. He said he then saw Prince retrieve a second knife which had been concealed, to Prince's knowledge, in the area of a nearby bush. Qasem said that Prince threatened him with that second knife and he used the knife that Prince had dropped in self-defence. By their verdict, of course, the jury rejected that defence.

The critical element in the sentencing of Qasem turned on whether there was evidence that Qasem had taken a knife to the scene. If he had, that gave rise to a significant uplift in the starting point and, as Mr Ford accepts, would give rise to a sentence in this case which was unimpeachable. The judge found as a fact that Qasem had taken a knife to the scene. In her sentencing remarks she made the following findings of fact:

Qasem sought permission to appeal against sentence on the basis that the judge erred in sentencing him on the basis that he took a knife to the scene of the murder. The single judge rejected that application and said this:

The renewed application is put on the same basis as before. No point is taken as to the judge's approach in law to the making of findings of fact in these circumstances. Mr Ford accepts that, in the normal way, a trial judge is in the best position to make such findings of fact. However, he says that in the circumstances here, the judge reached a finding that was unreasonable. In particular, he submits that it was unreasonable for the judge to have concluded that Qasem had a knife. That is principally because of the footage of the confrontation, which is said to demonstrate that Qasem did not have a knife.

It has taken some time and effort to identify the precise CCTV footage relied on for the purposes of that submission. We have watched all the CCTV footage, but the footage that is directly relevant to the renewed application is very short. By reference to the timings on the camera, which run from 16.08.47 to 16.08.59, we make a number of observations. That footage does not show very much of the initial confrontation. Instead it shows only the last part of that initial confrontation, by which time the applicant was by then the aggressor and Prince and Ricardo were moving backwards before turning to run away up the road.

As we have said, we have considered the CCTV footage and the other elements of the evidence. We have concluded that it cannot be said that the judge unreasonably made the findings of fact that she did, and we therefore refuse the renewed application. There are a number of separate reasons for that conclusion.

First, the judge was quite entitled to pay particular regard to the evidence of Mr Rogers. His evidence was only consistent with Qasem, who was easy to pick out because of his light coloured tracksuit, having a knife, which he withdrew at some point during the initial confrontation. Mr Rogers was fairly but fully cross-examined on the basis that he was mistaken, but he was quite unshakeable that that was not the case. No alternative explanation, save for one which we will come to in a moment, for the 4-inch silver article produced from Qasem's waistband, has ever been provided.

Secondly, as we have said, the CCTV footage is an incomplete record of what happened. The initial confrontation is already well advanced by the time the protagonists are shown in the footage. We think that is what the judge meant by saying the CCTV footage was unclear. By contrast, Mr Rogers saw the whole of the confrontation.

Thirdly, Mr Rogers' evidence was not in any event inconsistent with the CCTV footage. That footage was from a different angle and did not replicate Mr Rogers' sightline. The camera was looking across the front yard of the house and then across the road. It was side on to the events that were happening in the road. Mr Rogers, who was in a parked van in the road, therefore had a better view because he was able to look down the road at the events as they unfolded. Moreover, Mr Rogers was clear that the knife was taken from Qasem's waistband, which meant that, until it was removed, it was hidden and so would not necessarily have been captured on the incomplete CCTV footage. In particular, we note that at 16.08.55, which is the very moment that Prince turns to flee, Qasem is almost entirely hidden behind Mia.

Fourthly, Prince had been confident enough to punch Qasem three times in the face during the initial confrontation. He was certainly not cowed or tentative about attacking him, and yet something completely changed his attitude and caused him to run away in fear. The CCTV footage only shows that part of the story. But the only possible inference is that what made the difference was Qasem's production of the knife from his waistband.

Finally, Qasem stabbed Prince three times. By their verdict the jury rejected the submission of self-defence. In the light of that verdict and the other strands of evidence, the judge was quite entitled to reject as utterly implausible the factual basis on which the self-defence submission had been based, namely that having chased Prince to a different location where:

Possibly mindful of some of these difficulties, Mr Ford's oral submissions this morning suggested that if there was a knife at the time of the initial confrontation, it was in Mia's hand rather than Qasem's. That seems to us, in the circumstances of this case, to be a new and difficult submission to maintain. A knife is not shown on the CCTV in Mia's hand. It was not the evidence of Mr Rogers. Moreover, Qasem never at any stage suggested that Mia had a knife, much less that he had obtained the knife from Mia in order to stab Prince. Mr Ford accepted therefore that if this potential new submission was right, it meant that Qasem was not telling the truth even now about the provenance of the knife. In our view, none of that can plausibly support a conclusion that the judge was wrong to find, as a fact and to the criminal standard, that Qasem had had the knife which Mr Rogers had seen in his hand, and had subsequently used that knife to kill Prince.

Taking all the circumstances into account, we conclude that the evidence was overwhelming that Qasem had a knife, that he produced it after he had been punched, which caused Prince (the original aggressor) suddenly to fear for his own safety and flee, and that armed with the knife, Qasem pursued Prince and extracted terrible retribution for the earlier punches by stabbing Prince with the knife. We consider that any other conclusion based on all the material that we have seen would be unrealistic.

For those reasons, notwithstanding Mr Ford's clear submissions, we conclude that the judge was entitled to make the finding that she did, and then it cannot be said that in some way that finding was unreasonable. We agree with the single judge's rejection of the application for permission to appeal. This renewed application is therefore refused.