Five time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
2A Kingsgate Road, KIlburn @Googlemaps August2008
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINE: Wednesday the 6th of February 2008, the body of Lakhdar Ouyahia was found by the bins on Kingsgate Place in KIlburn, wrapped in a duvet. Someone had attempted to cut off his limbs and had decapitated his head. But who had killed this good and decent man, why had his neighbour vanished, and why had an innocent woman been tortured for 14 hours?
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: How far would one man go to prove his ‘devotion’ to the woman he ‘loved’? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing beside the Regent’s Canal in Little Venice, Maida Vale, W9; one street east of the killing of pensioner Samuel Bragg, one street south of the double suicide of the Mercy Murderess, one street north of ‘The Saviour’, several boat lengths from the suitcase of Marta Ligman’s body, and close to a brothel inspected (all too vigorously) by ten dedicated policeman - coming soon to Murder Mile. It’s a bit of a joke, as with the real Venice having as many as 472 bridges and 177 canals across its 2.9 square miles, Little Venice, also known as Browning’s Pool is just a triangular basin measuring a measly 120 by 170 yards (or a standard football pitch); with one canal, three bridges, a coffee shop, a lot of litter, ten homeless tents, a dead dog floating in an oil slick, and a sea of tourists grumbling “is this is?” On the northern leg of the Regent’s Canal heading to Camden is the entrance to the Maida Hill tunnel. At 249 yards long, it scoots under the Edgware Road, and if you’re sitting in Laville, an excellent Italian restaurant situated above, you can munch on a marvellous margarita and sup a sumptuous espresso as you watch the canal boats chug by. Just don’t look too closely at what lies underneath the water. On the afternoon of Sunday the 10th of February 2008, Police divers scoured the murky depths of this part of the canal searching for the final bizarre piece of the puzzle in this macabre murder. It began as a sordid love triangle of sorts, and it had ended with torture, mutilation and 24 hours of pure hell. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 339: Headless. Wednesday the 6th of February 2008 began as an ordinary late-winter’s day on the Kilburn High Road. In this part of North West London, world events (like Hillary Clinton & Barrack Obama’s Super Tuesday race for the Democratic nomination, Prime Minister Gordon Brown negotiating a military escalation in Afghanistan, and Kylie Minogue’s costumes on display at the V&A) were of insignificance, as the locals were heading to work, to school, to the dole office, or awaiting a call on their immigration status. Kilburn High Road is an odd place, as where once it was very English middleclass neighbourhood, and in parts it still is, it then established an Irish area, then a Jewish one, until it became a world microcosm and a melting pot of every nationality, language and culture usually concentrated in a small part of a street; whether an Eritrean enclave, or a Somalia section, with one part being dubbed as ‘Little Beirut’. For foodies, it’s a tantalising assault on the senses, and although an area rich in cultural diversity, with many immigrants being temporarily housed here and struggling to cope on limited incomes while their status is being reviewed, it has become littered with discount stores, and unfortunately, a lot of crime. At 142 Kilburn High Road stood Somerfield, a handy supermarket. At its rear was Kingsgate Place, an unlit side-alley tucked behind the shops, and the kind of place you wouldn’t go to, unless you had to. At 7:10am, 15 minutes before dawn, when the store opened and delivery trucks rolled up, a homeless man in his 50s was ferreting through the rancid bins at the back of Somerfield, starving. The night had been cruelly cold, his makeshift bed in a doorway was made sodden by the rain, and with a familiar grumble from his empty belly, he ripped open the bags of food, too old to sell, but barely okay to eat. The milk was off, but only just ‘on the turn’. The bread was limp and soggy. Too many items he couldn’t take as he had no way to cook them, or dry them out. But it was as his attention was drawn to a silver coloured roller cage, as used by shops to move stock, that he saw something which drew his eye. In the cage was a duvet, used but clean and almost dry. He tried to lift it, but it was too heavy. And it was as he tore away the gaffer tape, wound around the knotted lip to seal it shut, that he saw within… …something unspeakable. Police sealed off the street and forensics erected a tent as detectives went door-to-door. With no CCTV at the back of Kingsgate House where the cage sat, and no witnesses to what happened, the locals were unsurprised to learn that a dead body had been dumped there, having campaigned for years to have the building demolished, the alley covered by cameras and the security beefed up. Local, Cliff Aherne said: “Until they deal with these alleys, there will be problems. You don’t see people here but you know they are because of what they leave behind, needles and human mess”. Ade Abame said: “I walked past this morning with my children. How long was this poor person lying there? It's terrible”. And Homayon Mahgerefteh bemoaned the recent spate of gang and drug-related killings, stating “This is, I think, the fifth person killed in this area in the last four years. It's not a safe place". With the murder squad headed up by Detective Chief Inspector Jessica Wadsworth, it was only as the duvet was opened fully in St Pancras hospital’s mortuary, that they saw what they were dealing with. The duvet was used but bloodless, proving that he hadn’t died in bed. The gaffer tape was generic and couldn’t be identified to any brand or store. Fingerprints were found on the tape, DNA on the duvet, and both sets of DNA and fingerprints were in the process of being checked. And with his body clean and free of any needle marks, scars or tattoos, he wasn’t homeless, a drug user, or killed by a gang. Stripped of any ID or clothes, all they knew was that he was an adult male in his 40s of indeterminate ethnic origin, possibly Middle Eastern or North African, and that he had died 24 to 36 hours before. And yet, even with a fresh corpse before them, the pathologist couldn’t determine a cause of death, as having been murdered in a fast brutal away which resulted in no defensive wounds, someone in the grip of panic or mania had crudely attempted to severe both arms, and fully decapitated his head… …only that was missing, as was the weapon and the culprit. Detectives admitted “we don’t know what we’re dealing with”, as it wasn’t a professional hit, it lacked the cruelty of a revenge killing and it was too calculated to be by someone who was mentally unhinged. As was standard practice, the detectives set up a temporary headquarters at the Quex Road Methodist Church at 3 Kingsgate Road, overlooking the junction of Kingsgate Place where the body was found - a decision which proved to be ironic and prophetic – as with the victim’s fingerprints being found on the Home Office’s database, it turned out that he lived in a flat directly opposite at 2a Kingsgate Road. His name was Lakhdar Ouyahia. Born in 1964 in an unspecified part of the north-African country of Algeria, it was unreported when or why 43-year-old Lakhdar came to Britain, but the Algerian Civil War – known as the Black Decade – was being fought from 1992 to 2002 between the Algerian government and the Islamic rebel groups. For westerners, the 7/7 bombings and 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks were epoch-making moments in our lives, but for the people of Algeria during this ‘dirty war’, these kinds of atrocities were weekly or daily events. With the GIA (the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria) being backed by Al-Qaida, innocent civilians were indiscriminately slaughtered in beheadings, lynchings and suicide bombings, with acts of extreme violence and brutality which saw children widely being used as both terrorists and targets. Desperate to be seen as a terrifying force willing to undertake the most barbaric acts to gain power and the maximum of exposure on the world stage, they killed and executed over 70 journalists, 100 foreign nationals, and with the death toll rising so quickly it was impossible for human rights groups to keep tally, it is estimate that the number of fatalities was at least 44,000, up to as many as 200,000. With so many massacres rampaging across the country, including the Oued Bouaicha massacre where 47 villagers (27 of which were children) were hacked to death with knives and axes, the West didn’t pay much attention until a GIA terror plot was foiled at the 1998 World Cup in France; and although they had planned to kill 1000s of players and fans in a grenade attack, with a bomb under the England team’s bench and their hotel, it was overshadowed by so-called England fans who ran riot like thugs. Like so many of his countrymen, Lakhdar sought freedom from persecution and a better life in Britain, where freedom of speech and a right to live in peace is something that, sadly, we all take for granted. Everyone who knew him said he was hardworking and polite, a kind and decent man who earned a modest wage as a meter reader for the electricity board, and although quiet, as the sort of chap who kept to himself and was a skilled electrician and handyman, if you needed a job done, he was there. A few years before, he had moved into the upstairs flat at 2a Kingsgate Road; a slapdash two-storey house built on the cheap, with several cars on a weed-infested drive behind a five-foot tall iron gate with ‘2A’ hastily daubed in white paint, crammed into a filthy gap between a dingy spot called Leith Yard, a warehouse on Kingsgate Place, and the back of Rak’s newsagents and Tim’s café on Quex Road. Provided by Camden Council, it was cheap, but he made it his own, and although he got on well with his downstairs neighbour, a fellow Algerian, he didn’t cause any problems and had no criminal record. Within a day of his decapitated body being found just 80 feet away, when they searched his flat, they found no signs of any struggle, break-in or robbery, and nothing which suggested his life was anything but innocent; no drugs, no guns, no cruel ideologies, no bloodstains, and his duvet was still on his bed. Lakhdar had lived a quiet life, and for no clear reason, someone had murdered him… …but a bizarre piece of the puzzle in this macabre murder was still missing. On the afternoon of Sunday 10th of February 2008, on Blomfield Road, a residential street which skirts the Regent’s Canal, just south of Little Venice at the gaping mouth of Maida Hill tunnel, Police divers were searching the murky depths of these dark cold waters. On the path, handcuffed to a detective, a big man with a freshly shaven head pointed at a spot, where he told them he had thrown something. Across the oil-slicked surface, an occasional bubble of air popped as the diver exhaled, and then, with a steady hand, he raised aloft an orange Sainsbury’s carrier bag, 9lbs in weight and football shaped. Inside lay the crudely hacked-apart remains of Lakhdar’s head… …as pointed to by his neighbour, Mohamed. Like Lakhdar, 46-year-old Mohamed Boudjenane was an Algerian who came to Britain during the Black Decade seeking sanctuary from persecution, but whereas Lakhdar obeyed the law and paid his taxes, Mohamed’s life was either deliberately criminal, a litany of lies, or due to his declining mental state. He arrived illegally in the UK in 1996, having purchased a fake French ID card in Spain. Across the next two years, he lived under the radar and worked cash in cash as a nobody who technically didn’t exist. In 1998, with UK immigration after him, he pleaded asylum claiming that he and his business partner had been threatened by GIA, the Al-Qaida backed terrorists. Every claim had to be checked, but with no proof that he had even been approached, by 2001, after five years in London, he was scheduled to be deported, but appealed. By 2003, when his asylum was rejected for the final time, he had already worked several jobs (as a handyman at a golf club), and now, his reason to stay had escalated further. In 2001, he had begun claiming unemployment benefits. In 2002, unable to work, he claimed sickness and incapacity benefits. And in 2004, being at risk of homelessness, he was provided a council flat on the ground floor of 2a Kingsgate Road in Kilburn, with his deportation in limbo owing to his health issues. Under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, “courts can block removal (of a person to their home country), if returning would cause a rapid and irreversible decline in their health, due to intense suffering". Physically he was fine, overweight yet healthy, but mentally, he said he was not. In 2003, possibly exacerbated by his looming deportation, Mohamed went to his GP complaining of depression. He was prescribed Sertraline, a common antidepressant, and yet, at a follow-up with his psychiatrist at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, it was decided “he had no symptoms of depression”. That April, he fraudulently filled out a disabled person’s freedom pass, giving him unlimited free travel across London having claimed he was under the Mental Health Act (which he wasn’t, as he had never been sectioned), and again, he stated he’d been diagnosed with a personality disorder ten years prior. In August 2005, again with his immigration status being investigated, he told a psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital that he was hearing strange voices in his head and had suicidal thoughts. The psychiatrist concluded “he did not have any psychiatric illness”, and being treated over a year at an outpatients’ clinic, his record states “his mood was improved being prescribed a tranquilliser and anti-psychotics”. Since the day he was arrested, just one day after Lakhdar’s decapitated body was found, he claimed to be mentally unwell, which prosecutor William Boyce QC refuted stating “he has been trying to make himself look odd. He has faked illness previously to get economic advantages like a flat and benefits”. Of the voices in his head, Mohamed claimed "I feel as if I'm getting an electric shock in my brain… I lose control. I cannot concentrate". Of the heinous crimes he had done, through an interpreter, he claimed to have amnesia and pleaded his innocence as he couldn’t remember committing the murder. And when asked by Orlando Pownall QC, his tax-payer funded lawyer, "what do you think it was that made you depressed?" – which he claimed led him to kill – Mohamed said "Religion. Sharia, Islam". Only to then claim he went on naked midnight walks, denied that he was feigning any illness, stating that he’d been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and saying "I cannot specify what I suffer from mentally". In court, his psychiatric history was a mess… …as was his memory, or so he stated. It began four months before, when Mohamed went to a party held at the Quex Road Methodist Church directly opposite, and met a woman whose name shall remain a secret. She was a 42-year-old Filipino nanny from Oxford and a married mother of four, who was a regular church goer and choral singer. They chatted, she was polite, he became obsessed with her, and she rejected his advances. In the last week of January 2008, one week before the brutal murder, having claimed in court that he had been in a relationship with her (which he wasn’t), and stated “I used a ladder and climbed it and saw them”, the woman and his neighbour, Lakhdar – who didn’t know each other – having sex in the upstairs flat, “I ran away and tried to cool myself down. I was very angry”. But did that even happen? On Sunday 3rd of February 2008, just shy of 3pm, as the nanny headed to choir practice at the church, she bumped into Mohamed outside of Rak’s newsagents on Quex Road. They argued, he grabbed her phone, and having ran to his ground floor flat at 2a Kingsgate Road, she followed him to get it back. He double locked the door, she then realised that she was trapped, and that’s when her horror began. With the street noisy, no neighbours either side and Lakhdar not in, no-one heard her screams. Using shoes laces, he tightly bound her wrists and ankles, and recalled “I told her to tell me the truth about the man upstairs”, her supposed lover (who she had never met) who he described as his "best enemy". She denied it, and every time she did, he slapped her until her face was a patchwork of black and blue bruises. Seeing her words as nothing but lies, he threatened to slit her throat with a kitchen knife and a Samurai sword. And with this woman who he called a “whore” having supposedly cheated on him, boiling a kettle, he kept splashing the scolding liquid perilously close, until she confessed to the affair. She couldn’t, as she hadn’t, and although these mental tortures were cruel, worse was yet to come. He told her “you need to drink, it’s your last day today”, as knowing he had murder on his mind, across every second of her 14-hour ordeal, she thought of her four children and how they could be orphaned. In court, with her hair having never grown back fully, she gave an emotional testimony wearing a black wig, as he had shaved her head with an electric razor, telling her “you won’t need hair in heaven”. And with her telling the jury “he kept shouting at me to take off my clothes. Because I was scared, I did so. I was naked. He took off his as well. I said to him I will do what ever you want me to but don’t kill me”. He raped her three times, forced her o degrade herself, and then in court claimed it was consensual. Across the afternoon, evening and well into the night, her subjected her to a terrifying ordeal, as being naked, she was repeatedly threatened, beaten and raped, with her only way of escape being to “tell the truth”, but if she told Mohamed what he wanted to hear, what would her punishment be for that? She had no way to win, and every way to lose. DCI Wadsworth said of her bravery, “I find it hard to imagine the trauma, the fear she experienced while being beaten, tied up, raped… she fully expected to meet her death… throughout it all she has shown amazing strength”, and although exhausted and terrified, it was around 5am, 14 hours after her abduction, that – having agreed that she would to convert to Islam and marry him – he let her go. She fled back to Oxford, and as far as we know, being traumatised, she told no-one about her ordeal. Miraculously, she had escaped with her life, but Lakhdar (her alleged lover) wouldn’t be so lucky. Hours later, when Lakhdar returned from work, knowing that he would never turn down a neighbour in need, Mohamed knocked on his door, told him that his electrics had gone out, Lakhdar grabbed his tools and went into the darkness of the ground floor flat where the circuit breakers had been tripped. With no argument or struggle, Mohamed whacked Lakhdar over the head with a claw hammer, caving in his skull and exposing his brain, as he slumped to the floor, unaware of his death or the accusation. Stripped of his clothes and ID; everything was burned, the weapon was destroyed, and living in a busy part of the city where many shops are open 24 hours, to dispose of the body, Mohamed headed to a discount shop on Kilburn High Road and with Lakhdar being tall, he bought the large suitcase they had. With a meat cleaver from his kitchen, he clumsily hacked away at the back of the neck, taking several attempts to severe the cervical spine between C2, C3 and C4, and with the blood having coagulated, there was no pooling or spray, as the 9lb skull came away from the neck and lolloped on the linoleum. To fit him into the case, next-up for dismemberment was his limbs, but it wasn’t as easy as it seemed, even with a butcher’s blade, and having hacked and slashed at his arms and legs, ultimately giving up exhausted, although Lakhdar was slim, he was still too tall to fit into the suitcase, even without a head. At 8pm, security cameras in Sainsbury’s at 90 Kilburn High Road caught him buying bleach and a mop. The next night, Tuesday the 5th, at the Quex Road stop, he boarded the N98 bus using his freedom pass, carrying an orange Sainsbury’s carrier bag with a football-sized object within, and with Lakhdar’s head on his lap, he quietly sat for 20 minutes, as the bus wendled its merry way towards Little Venice. Getting off at the Maida Hill tunnel, he tossed it into the canal, later denying to his lawyer any memory of the death, dissection or disposal. “Do you accept that you must have taken the head on the bus and threw it into the canal?”, “No”, “Who else could it have been if it wasn’t you?”, “I can’t remember”. ”Did you use a cleaver to cut his head off?”, “I don’t know”. But the evidence would prove that it was. In the early hours of Wednesday 6th, with it too difficult to chop up and too heavy to carry, Mohamed wheeled a silver coloured roller cage to his flat, wrapped the body in a duvet, bound it in gaffer tape, wheeled it towards the supermarket’s bins, and believed it would be disposed of with the rubbish… …only for it to be found a few hours later by a hungry homeless man. Mohamed fled three hours north to Alvaston in Derbyshire to stay with a girlfriend, and although he shaved his head in a hope of disguising his identity, the next day, he was spotted and arrested. (End) When interviewed, his answers were vague and translated through an Arabic interpreter. From the day of his arrest, he claimed he was suffering from schizophrenia and amnesia during his crimes. Tried at the Old Bailey in November 2008 before Judge Christopher Moss QC, he pleaded ‘not guilty’ to two counts of rape, false imprisonment and murder, but ‘guilty’ to manslaughter by diminished responsibility. The Prosecution refuted his claim stating “sexual jealousy led him to punish the woman, then it was the man’s turn, but he wasn’t going to be allowed to live. This was premeditated murder”. Found ‘guilty’ of all charges and with the diminished responsibility claim dismissed (having never been sectioned, or diagnosed as mentally unwell), on the 6th of November 2008, 46-year-old Mohamed Boudjenane was sentenced to 15 years for rape and false imprisonment, a life sentence for murder, and ordered to serve a minimum term of 22 years in prison. He was not eligible for parole until 2030. Summing up, Judge Christopher Moss said “you brutalised your victim… imprisoned her… and raped her three times because you were obsessed with her… you murdered the man you wrongly perceived to be your rival… thereafter, you insulted his dead body by mutilation. You disposed of the head and body in an attempt to avoid capture. You are, it seems to me, a very dangerous individual, and it will be for others to decide whether it will ever be safe to release you”. And with that, his sentence began. But on the 28th of December 2011, at the Court of Appeal, with it decided by Judge Peter Beaumont QC that the trial judge had misdirected the jury on the psychiatric evidence, or lack of, the murder conviction was quashed, he accepted a plea of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, and had six years cut from his minimum sentence. Mohamed Boudjenane became eligible for parole in 2024, but with the Appeal Judge stating “the protection and the elimination of risk to the public is paramount”, so whether he will be released on parole or not is dependant on his current mental state. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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