No UK backing to free Bryant
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by Ian Wylie • The Foreign Office has refused to back the campaign to release Essex owner-driver Steve Bryant from a Moroccan jail.
Bryant, who is three years into a 10-year sentence for carrying cannabis, has always protested his innocence.
His family had hoped he would receive a pardon from King Hussein within the next couple of months. But the Foreign Office has decided there are no compelling grounds to support Bryant's plea for a pardon.
Instead it has proposed to the Moroccan government that it transfers Bryant to a British jail for the remainder of his sentence. However, the Foreign Office admits that the red tape could take months to sort out.
Stephen Jakobi, director of UK legal pressure group Fair Trials Abroad, says he is disappointed but not surprised. "The Foreign Office says it will support obvious miscarriages of justice," he says, "but I have yet to see it do so."
Bryant's Euro MP, Hugh Kerr, met the Moroccan ambassador to the EU two weeks ago to press for his freedom. This week Steve Norris—Bryant's local MP and director-general-elect of the Road Haulage Association—will write directly to King Hussein to seek a pardon.
Jakobi is still "reasonably confident" that Bryant will be released during the next rounds of pardons in May or July.
• Jakobi is appealing for information which might aid the release of a London driver being held by Greek police.
British driver James Dormer and his girlfriend Jacqui Rose are still awaiting trial in Greece after being accused of stealing a £45,000 load of boots they were due to deliver before Christmas. Jakobi is keen to contact another British truck driver called Gary, who Dormer says followed the couple on the journey to Greece and worked for a company called Cookes.