A KILLER who stabbed his friend to death before setting fire to his Shepherd’s Bush flat has failed in an appeal against his conviction.
Charles Lansiquot was jailed for a minimum of 20 years at the Old Bailey last August after being convicted of murdering drug ‘runner’ Ibrahim Al-Kledat in Lugard House, Bloemfontein Road.
The 54-year-old victim was found with multiple stab wounds on October 20, 2010, after fire crews responded to calls of a fire at the flat at 8.10am.
At midday, 43-year-old drug addict Lansiquot, of Bathurst House, White City, walked into Shepherd’s Bush police station to say he had witnessed Mr Al-Kledat’s death.
He claimed he was drinking with Mr Al-Kledat in the flat when two men with balaclavas broke in and stabbed him to death while they held him at gunpoint.
Lansiquot said the attackers forced him to clean the evidence from the flat before making him take off his clothes and threatening to kill his family if he told anyone what he had witnessed. But officers saw through his story and charged him with the murder three days later.
Police blasted his ‘lies’ after he was sentenced to life imprisonment with detective inspector Craig Jones saying: “Lansiquot not only dreamt up an elaborate sequence of events to explain the victim’s death, he also put the lives of other residents in the block of flats at risk when setting fire to the premises to cover his tracks.”
But the convicted murderer took his fight to London’s Criminal Appeal Court last week armed with a dossier of his own drafted court documents – one of which ran to 127 pages – accusing police of mishandling the investigation and claiming the conviction was ‘unsafe’.
But his appeal was rejected by a trio of top judges who said the case against him was ‘very strong’ and that there was ‘no substance’ to any of his complaints.
Sitting with Lord Justice Richards and Mr Justice Stuart-Smith, Mr Justice McCombe said: “We are not persuaded that any of the appellant’s intended grounds of appeal have anything of substance in them.”
