Relatives of the victims of last June’s fatal Nottingham knife attacks have expressed their alarm after learning police officers shared graphic details of their loved ones’ injuries over WhatsApp.
A disciplinary hearing held in January was told the message was sent to a group of officers on the app, with one of its members then forwarding it on to his wife and a friend. That officer, PC Matthew Gell, was given a final written warning, while the officer who originally sent the message was reprimanded by management.
“What an abhorrent way to conduct an investigation,” said Emma Webber, the mother of one of the victims, Barnaby Webber. Speaking on behalf of the three families, she told the Daily Mail: “We cannot emphasise how painful this tragedy is for all our families, and to learn that there has been internal needless voyeurism of the vicious knife attacks on our loved ones is unforgivable. We were not, at any point, made aware of this.”
Barnaby, along with fellow university student Grace O’Malley-Kumar, was killed by Valdo Calocane as they walked home from a night out together in Nottingham city centre in the early hours of 13 June 2023. The body of Ian Coates, a school caretaker, was later found about 2 miles away. Calocane also injured three more people when he drove a van into them at a bus stop in the city.
He pleaded guilty to three counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to paranoid schizophrenia, as well as three counts of attempted murder. But he denied murder and was sentenced to indefinite detention in a high-security hospital after the crown accepted his pleas.
The Mail reported that the bereaved families were due to meet the attorney general, Victoria Prentis, on Monday to hear the outcome of an independent review of that decision.
The attacks prompted a major police operation. As officers scrambled to respond to the killings, a shift WhatsApp group was sent the “distasteful” message. A disciplinary hearing heard Gell forwarded it after receiving messages from his wife and a friend asking about the situation. He was found guilty of gross misconduct. But after asking for a “second chance” he was not dismissed from Nottinghamshire police.
The force referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct after it emerged a warrant for Calocane’s arrest was outstanding at the time of the attacks, after he failed to appear in court nine months earlier for an alleged assault of a police officer while he was being sectioned.
