The Trial - Episode 2

The Crime Desk. Arresting podcasts. In May 2007, at Preston Crown Court, the trial begins. The courtroom is packed, judge and jury, lawyers, police. A shocking, brutal nature of the allegations has also attracted media attention from around the country. Reporters in and outside the court covering each day's events. Sitting there too is Charlene's family, including her parents, Karen and Bob. It's been more than three years since she disappeared.

Now, finally, they are face to face with the men accused of killing their daughter. 49-year-old Mohamed Raveshi, also known as Rez, and 28-year-old Ayad Albatiki, also known. as Eddie. They were both involved in the fast food industry in Blackpool. The younger man, Ayad, managed Funny Boy's Takeaway, named in reference to the famous drag cabaret Funny Girls.

just across the street. Rez, the older of the two, was a landlord and businessman around town. He partnered with Ayad on Funny Boys, loaning him some of the money to buy the business and taking a share of the profits. Ayad lived in a flat in one of Rez's properties. In the prosecution's opening statement, they say Charlene was one of a number of girls in Blackpool being groomed and abused by older men.

and that this is how she came into contact with the defendants. The QC tells the court that Ayad had sex with Charlene. Then, when she threatened to go to the police, Ayad killed her, and Rez helped dispose of the body. The kebab story. Through their lawyers, Rez and Ayad deny all of this. They say they've never even met Charlene. The only time they've seen her face is on the missing posters. The jury will decide.

Who is telling the truth? I'm Nicola Thorpe, and this is Charlene. Somebody knows something.

As the trial gets underway, the prosecution attacks Rezanayad's character. The judge has allowed bad character evidence to be heard in court. Essentially, testimony that Rez and Ayad are the kind of men who might do a monstrous thing like kill a young girl. A series of young women are called to the stand, testifying to their interactions with these men.

They recall being invited into the back room of funny boys by Ayad. They say he gave them drugs and persistently pursued them for sex. Remember Rachel? the girl who was given a sapphire ring and a pink Playboy watch. Oh, I can't believe this guy's, you know, getting me all this stuff or whatever. Ayad was that guy. In fact...

when he was charged with the murder of Charlene Downs, Ayad was already in custody. He'd been arrested for the alleged rape of a woman who wandered into his takeaway late at night, drunk and alone. The court also hears accusations from girls saying Rez had harassed them. One girl says that Rez groped and propositioned her. Another says that Rez tried to kiss her. Just like Ayad.

Rez was already in custody when he was charged in relation to Charlene Downs. He had broken bail conditions that had required him to stay away from some of those girls. Rez and Ayad strongly deny all the bad character allegations being made against them. Their defence barristers cross-examine the girls, calling them liars and trying to pick holes in their stories.

Rachel was one of the young women who took the stand, and she was asked about Ayad Albatiki, who she knew as Eddie. You had to look at the judge to answer your questions, even though you had someone else asking you the questions. And then directly opposite me in the court behind like plated glass was Ayyad Abitiki, Eddie, and Mohamed Raveshi. They were both sat there and Eddie was just...

smirking at me the entire time which was like really off-putting. I got asked a load of questions about my relationship with him, what we used to get up to, what drugs we did and stuff like that. whether he'd ever been forceful towards me or made advancements. And I answered all the questions openly and stuff. I really struggled to look...

to the left-hand side of me though because that's where Charlene's mother and the rest of the family were sat. Another girl who testified about IAD in court spoke to me on the condition of anonymity.

It was absolutely horrendous. I went into the court to stand in the box. He was there, obviously behind the screen, and he was shouting things at me when I was... speaking to the judge and his barrister just ripping into me and he was saying she's lying she's lying he was 16 when i knew her and just and i just couldn't believe like

The whole way it was, to be fair. It's hard to hear just how traumatic this was for her. Not only did she experience victimisation and grooming, but she then had to recount it in court. Those same experiences torn apart by a stern barrister in front of a gallery full of strangers, being shouted at by the defendant from behind a screen. While Ayad chooses not to give testimony in his own defence,

Rez is only too happy to take the stand. I have to say, I watched him give his evidence in court. He started off like a lunatic, whirling around from the witness box. Don Fraser was the disclosure officer for Blackpool Police. He attended every day of the trial and remembers watching Rez address the court. His own defence lawyers were wondering what on earth he was saying and why he was saying it. He came across like some demented Svengali. He really did.

His arms were waving. He was very, very emotive. Rez is his own most passionate advocate. Don Fraser says the court was taken aback by his demeanour. Everyone was sort of sniggering at him, but they weren't sniggering by the end. He just kept going. But after two and a half, three days, and he spent two and a half, three days, which is a huge ordeal, he got the feeling that he'd actually charmed the jury.

In this trial, there was no forensic evidence, no DNA evidence. There were no eyewitnesses and Charlene's body had not been found. But the prosecution had one key piece of evidence. One smoking gun. It was called Operation Aquatical, a series of surveillance recordings that had captured Rez and Ayad, in their own words, talking about what they'd done to Charlene.

Years earlier, the police had installed hidden microphones in Rez's flat and car. The men had been under 24-hour surveillance for almost a month. the police presented to the court some of the things they heard the men say during Operation Aquatical. We've reconstructed the most shocking lines from this evidence. Just a warning, you may find this upsetting.

The big bones went into the machine as well. You know that, don't you? It was the last deep one. And then it was the heart that finally killed her. Do you remember she was bleeding to death so that she made a fucking mess? I killed her. I was just angry. There is nothing left of her. She was here. She died. There really is nothing.

Charlene's parents, Karen and Bob, heard these tapes for the first time in court. I had to go out when I went out. When I walked out of court, I went in there. I had to go and sit down outside. I couldn't listen to it. I couldn't listen to it. It made me feel sick. It just seemed too horrific to be true. It just seemed unbelievably, you know, could anybody do that? You know, is that possible? It was horrific, cold-blooded, and it seemed that Rez and Ayad had been caught red-handed.

And so the jury is sent out to decide. Guilty or not guilty?

But on the 11th day of deliberations, the jurors returned to inform the judge that they have not been able to reach a verdict. It's a hung jury. This causes shockwaves throughout the courtroom. Bob Downs has to be restrained as the jury's statement is read out. Standing outside court, speaking to the media, he looks shell-shocked.

Devastated for all the family, traumatic in fact. I can't believe that we've been through all this to get told that it's a retrial. To be clear, this outcome isn't an acquittal. The jury is so divided that it can't even reach a decision for guilt or innocence. But this case was supposed to be clear-cut. The prosecution had tapes of these men admitting to it.

So what happened? Do you remember when I told you that the kebab story was bullshit? Let me explain why. It's an extraordinary story with some twists and turns, so bear with me. But it all hinges on the prosecution's smoking gun. Operation Aquatical. Those tapes of Rez and Ayad. Because the tapes weren't quite what they were made out to be. Here's the backstory. A year after Charlene's disappearance, an informant

told police that he'd had a conversation with Ayad's brother. In this conversation, the brother revealed that Ayad knew what had happened to Charlene. The informant agreed to work with the police as a covert human intelligence source. He wore a hidden microphone and was sent to speak with Ayad's brother so that he could get him to repeat this revelation, but this time on tape.

The information from this source led to the police getting a warrant to install secret microphones in Rez's flat and car. The microphones were monitored around the clock. recording dozens of hours of conversation. But when those tapes came back, the quality was questionable. The recordings were noisy. The microphones had been set up next to a television.

so the background noise made it difficult to make out what was being said. Often, Rez and Ayad were speaking quickly or quietly, and although they communicated in English, they spoke with heavy accents. The audio was... Difficult to listen to, let alone understand. But one detective offered to take on the task of listening to and transcribing all those tapes. Detective Sergeant Jan Besant.

Remember that name. We'll come back to her. She spent almost an entire year listening to and painstakingly transcribing 52 audio tapes. The prosecution selected their evidence from Jan's transcripts. Jan Besant was granted expert status by the court and took the stand to walk the jury through what she'd heard on those tapes. And when audio was played in court, the jury were given printouts of Jan's transcripts so they could follow along. I tried for so long to get copies of those tapes.

And finally, I managed to get my hands on some of the audio that was actually played during the trial. So let's have a listen. Okay, did you catch that? Me neither. I couldn't believe the poor quality of the recordings. I sat down with my producer, Matt, to go through them. So I'm going to play this first selection here. It's just a short clip. This is from what was called tape 29 in the evidence. We've cut out some of the gaps and the silences.

Listening to this, I couldn't make kind of heads or tails. It sounds like the microphone is not close to the person who's talking. Maybe they're turned away from it. There's so much white noise happening as well, background noise that is just... Really painful to listen to, actually. And you can hear that there's some sort of TV show going on in the background as well, because there's another voice there. So Jan Besant says...

Why did you do it? Why did you kill her? For that part, yeah. Another forensic audiologist listening to the same thing thinks it's, why did you... And so obviously that, whether it's kill or think or another word... changes it kind of massively as to the pertinence of what they're saying. Of course. And to me, he's absolutely would put my house on it. Why did you take this?

But it just shows, I mean, I don't know who's right or wrong. I don't know what's said, but it just goes to show that how much of this is in dispute. It's not clear cut what they were. And how one can feel confident with something. And then another person can have a completely different interpretation of what is being said. And that's the key point.

What was being said on these tapes was not some objective piece of evidence. It was highly contested in court. Rez personally went through the transcripts and audio, preparing for the trial from his jail cell. Just as Jan Besant explained to the court what she had heard, Rez provided his own version of what was being said. On top of that, the prosecution had enlisted the help of a forensic audiologist.

who provided their own transcripts of part of the tapes. So for some sections of audio, there were three different versions of what was actually being said. I want to talk about something else that might have undermined the Operation Aquatical Evidence. Jan Besant was the only person who'd sat down, listened to and made transcriptions of all the tapes.

But she wasn't a neutral party. And so the defence said that Besant was susceptible to confirmation bias. Jan Besant had been part of the police investigation into these two men. building up evidence that they were guilty of murder. It's likely that she already thought they were guilty. After all, the police had got warrants to search their house and install surveillance. So wasn't it possible that when the tapes were hard to make out,

Jan Besant would hear the kind of words she was hoping to hear. Killed. Burial. Body. Put together, all that uncertainty had been damaging to the prosecution's case. When you read Jan Besson's transcripts on paper, yeah, it seems clear-cut. But when you hear the tapes themselves... and you're presented with alternate interpretations, it's a lot less clear. Even Karen Downes, sitting in court, had to rely on reading Jambescent's transcripts.

It was so convincing with the way it was, because I didn't just hear it. I read the transcripts while I was reading that. Oh, my God. It was still awful to read, still awful to hear what I could hear of it. I couldn't understand it that well. I couldn't. Not that one anyway, but I went off the transcript. What Jan Besant did, you know. I can't get over how cruel this must have been for a mother. Having to sit in court.

reading those grisly details said about your daughter, and then hearing that maybe that wasn't what was being said at all. And here's the thing. These tapes had been the prosecution's... Only piece of evidence that Rez and Ayad were responsible for the murder of Charlene. Remember, no forensics, no DNA, no body, no eyewitnesses. The prosecution's case depended on those tapes.

But it hadn't been enough to convince the jury. And so, preparations began for a retrial. But then, another blow to the Downs family. It was the day. I had a phone call. I had to go down to the police station and they told me that the next trial wasn't going to take place. In April 2008, just weeks before the second trial was due to start, the Crown Prosecution Service...

tells the judge and the defence that they've identified a number of issues with the evidence. But the public aren't told what those issues are. They formally withdraw their evidence. effectively dropping the case against Rez and Ayad. And today the prosecution announced they did. couldn't offer any evidence against Mohamed Ribeshi, who was charged with assisting an offender, and another man who we can't name for legal reasons, who was charged over Charlene's murder.

This retrial had promised closure for the Downs family. But now, their heartache would continue. I was really, really, really upset. Bob sort of didn't say much. He's not one to show his emotions. He sort of carries it inwardly. But this, I went back. I got home. And I did nothing but cry all night. I was looking down crying. I couldn't, I can't take this. I can't cope with this anymore. When is this ever going to end? And so the case faded away.

Maybe its biggest legacy was the kebab story. A girl's body being cut up and mixed with meat in a takeaway. I want to make this clear. There is no evidence that that ever happened. The kebab theory was based on two things. One was a comment captured in the Operation Aquatical Surveillance made by one of Rez's friends, who joked that Rez should turn one of his enemies into a kebab. The other was also a story.

from a girl who said she overheard Ayad laughing with some other takeaway workers, making a joke that Charlene had ended up in a kebab. These are barely rumours. But that hasn't stopped this story living on. Google Charlene's name right now and you'll see her referred to to this day as Kebab Girl. If my investigation for this podcast achieves anything I hope it brings an end to this false and damaging narrative.

Not just because it's a lie, but because a missing 14 year old girl, a victim of child sexual abuse, deserves more than being reduced to a piece of meat in a headline. As for the defendants. Mohamed Raveshi, Rez, walked free, and any charges relating to harassment accusations made against him were dropped. He'd spent two and a half years in custody.

the longest stretch of anyone without a conviction in the northwest of England. Ayyad al-Batiki remained behind bars for the allegation of rape that had brought him into custody in the first place, but that charge was eventually dropped too. Both men were awarded around £250,000 each for wrongful imprisonment. I spoke to Detective Superintendent Gareth Willis.

He became the senior investigating officer in charge of Charlene's case in 2022. And he was unequivocal. The evidence around the covert material that was relied upon in court... has been fatally undermined and is not accurate, is not truthful. So we all acknowledge that that evidence does not exist. It's been reviewed independently and...

What was documented as being fact is in fact not true. So I think that is a really important point to stress. In the eyes of the law, those men are innocent and we do not have any evidence to suggest. anything to the contrary. But there are still some people who think that Rez and Ayad got away with it. Don Fraser, who was the police disclosure officer for the case and attended every day of the trial, is one of them.

Do you think Mohamed Raveshi is guilty of the crime of disposing of Charlene's body? Yes, I do. I believe he was guilty as charged. It's also Karen Downs' belief. Is it still your belief that... It was Iyad and Riveshi. Yeah. Yes, I still think so. So do my daughters as well. My whole family still believes it's them. Can't prove it's them.

I mean, I know they said that there was something wrong with the tapes, but from what we heard, it left no doubt in our mind. Now, to an extent, I can understand this view. If you read a transcript or an article that said in black and white... that two men were talking about killing Charlene. Could she be blamed for thinking they were guilty and had been let off on some technicality?

When I went down the rabbit hole, looking into the story of Charlene Downs and delved into the details of this case, I had my own questions about what had happened. Why had the police and the prosecutors staked this case on evidence that fell apart so quickly? What was the real story here? And the two defendants, who are now forever linked with Charlene, what would they say?

about the case in their own words. I wanted to hear from them. So I got the contact details for Mohamed Raveshi, Rez. And it turned out he was all too happy to speak with me. This was a man who'd been held in prison for years for a crime he didn't commit. A man who people still think is guilty. Why would he not just try and move past this whole ordeal? Why did he want to speak with me?

But from the moment he walked free from that courtroom and spoke to the media, it was clear what Rez thought about what had happened to him. The lies, this whole thing has been just like an imaginary case in the head and had no basis. It has been proved today. Rez is defiant, outraged. He believes he is a victim in this story too, and he wanted to tell me why. And so, recorder in hand, I knocked on the door of the man I once believed was responsible for killing Charlene.

And he told me that the case against him wasn't just a mistake. It was a setup. Then I knew that, you know, it is something bigger than that. It seemed to me that these people are hell... Next time on Charlene, somebody knows something. Can you see? There is a gay who is more clever. They're not bothered about the truth. The truth gets lost in that system like that. And I threatened him. I will cause you some serious, serious harm. Get out of my house. We will never speak again.

Tears come to my mind. I said, what the fuck is going on? What is happening? If you have any information about the disappearance of Charlene Downs, you can contact us at Charlene. at thecrimedesk.com Charlene, Somebody Knows Something is a Chalk and Blade production for The Crime Desk. It's hosted and investigated by me, Nicola Thorpe. Produced by Nicola Thorpe.

And Matt Nielsen. Written by Matt Nielsen. The story editor is Sarah Stollartz. Sound design by John Scott. The executive producer for Chalk and Blade is Ruth Barnes. For the Daily Mail, the executive producer is Bella Soames and Jamie East is the commissioning editor. New episodes of Charlene, Somebody Knows Something are released weekly. If you can't wait until next week, members of the Crime Desk can access every episode in this series straight away.

No need to wait. And if that wasn't enough, you'll also get exclusive access to all our shows, such as heists, scams and lies, and weekly bonus episodes of our award-winning... The trial. Head to thecrimedesk.com.