A JUDGE criticised senior police officers yesterday as details emerged of a bugging scandal in a force that had already been accused of secretly recording conversations between suspects and their lawyers.

After Edward Grant was convicted at Nottingham Crown Court of hiring a hitman to murder his wife’s lover it was revealed that his trial had faced collapse because Lincolnshire officers had installed bugging devices in a corridor and a yard at Sleaford police station.

In May, defence counsel had argued in pre-trial hearings that the officers’ intention had been to tape legally privileged conversations between the suspects and their solicitors.

Eighteen months ago, in an unconnected case, a murder trial collapsed after a court was told of the use of covert audio surveillance equipment at a police station in Lincolnshire. Three detectives have been the object of a 15-month inquiry into the use of the equipment in that case.

Mr Justice Astill refused an application for the case against Grant to be dismissed but said that though the police actions did not constitute grounds for the case to be withdrawn, there was the “clearest indication that this went beyond incompetence and into deceit”. He said the blame “must lie with the senior officers”.

Grant, 40, of Grantham, was found guilty of conspiracy to murder and was warned by the judge that he faced a life sentence. He had plotted a contract killing with criminals after his friend Ian Dowling, 39, began a relationship with his wife, Amanda, 36. Mr Dowling was shot dead in 2001 when he opened the door of his house.

Police have not established who fired the shots and the jury cleared Ram Labhaya Chand and Lublara Singh Sond, both of Birmingham, of helping to plan the killing.

At the pre-trial hearings, which could not be reported until the trial ended, it emerged that police twice recorded conversations between two suspects and their solicitors at Sleaford police station in June 2001, soon after using similar tactics in the inquiry into the murder of Mark Corley, 23.

A man accused of Mr Corley’s murder and four men charged with conspiracy to kill him walked free from Nottingham Crown Court in January last year after Mr Justice Newman learnt that officers had bugged their conversations with legal representatives. Acquitting all five, he accused the police of a “flagrant breach of the law”.

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