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Legal campaigners condemn 'wicked' treatment of driver
Page 18
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A "provably innocent" British driver is stuck in a Spanish jail — and Fair
Trials Abroad is blaming the UK Home Office. Guy Sheppard reports.
LEGAL CAMPAIGNERS say a UK trucker involved in a botched undercover operation to catch drug traffickers has spent 20 months in jail even though police know he is innocent.
Fair Trials Abroad describes the treatment of Steven Toplass as -wicked" because recordings of phone conversations prove he knew nothing about a 400kg consignment of cannabis found in his load.
Director Stephen Jakobi says Toplass was hired by drug traffickers to pick up a sealed container in which the drugs were hidden. The British National Crime Squad apparently intended to arrest the traffickers when the load arrived in the UK from Spain.
However, Jakobi reports that when Toplass was unexpectedly arrested by Spanish police on his way home, the Home Office did nothing to affirm his innocence:" I
think it is wicked that an innocent man has been left to dangle in the breeze, and even when the Home Office was contacted about him, they didn't want to know," he comments. Jakobi remarks that this is the first case he has come across in which the Home Office is responsible for such injustice, rather than a foreign judicial system.
Toplass, from Stoke-on-Trent,
was jailed for three and a half years in February 2004. Toplass's fiancee, Diane Downes. says he was between jobs when he took on the Spanish delivery as a one-off. -I-1e is absolutely appalled at the way the British Government has behaved," she adds. "He has just been completely ignored."
This week (21 November) the Home Office is expected to respond to parliamentary questions about the case fromToplass's local MP, Robert Flello.
But it denies failing to act responsibly towards'Ibplass;"It is not the role of the Home Office to enter into discussions or negotiations with foreign jurisdictions about the guilt or innocence of UK nationals held in prison abroad," it states.
"Neither can we or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office interfere in the judicial process of another country."