SCOTLAND YARD has attacked the BBC for falsely claiming that a corrupt detective had helped to ensure that the killers of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager, would never be brought to justice.

The BBC was also wrong to claim, in the same documentary, that the Metropolitan police had kept vital testimony about the officer from the Macpherson inquiry, which examined failings in the murder investigation.

The Met attacked the BBC after an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), published this weekend, found no evidence to support the allegations.

In a statement issued today the Met said: “Despite cooperating fully with the BBC we were disappointed with the quality, approach and balance of the documentary. The claims were untrue and we told them this.

“We were disappointed that the BBC compounded the issue by choosing to utilise the full weight of their very powerful publicity machinery to inflate disproportionately the importance and value of their findings about alleged corruption.”

The criticism will add to pressure on the BBC, which is facing a crisis over the misrepresentation of footage of the Queen and also of rigging the results of audience competitions.

The latest controversy centres on a documentary entitled The Boys Who Killed Stephen Lawrence, which was screened last July. The 18-year-old was stabbed to death after being confronted by a gang of white youths in Eltham, south London, in 1993. Despite a number of investigations by the Met, nobody has been convicted of his murder.

The programme claimed there was a corrupt relationship between John Davidson, a detective assigned as the family liaison officer in the Lawrence murder inquiry, and Clifford Norris, a convicted criminal and father of one of the suspects.

The BBC also stated that the Met had evidence of this corrupt relationship and had sought to conceal it from the public inquiry into the murder, chaired by Sir William Macpherson.

The IPCC found no evidence to suggest that the allegations in the programme were true. It said it had “found no evidence that a corrupt relationship affected the original investigation . . . The IPCC also found no evidence the Metropolitan police failed to inform the Stephen Lawrence inquiry about concerns regarding one of the police witnesses”.

As well as further tarnishing the BBC’s reputation, the programme has also damaged its relations with the police.

One senior officer said the BBC had gone ahead with its programme despite being repeatedly told it was wrong: “We told them they were really barking up the wrong tree, but they did that bloody programme anyway.

“The night before it was broadcast they just pumped out the publicity. ”

Rebecca Marsh, an IPCC commissioner who had supervised the report, said it seemed that the key witness quoted by the BBC to support its allegations appeared to have confused Clifford Norris with a police informant called David Norris - who died in 1991, two years before Lawrence was murdered.

Read the rull IPCC report

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