THE young man’s body was well and truly ablaze by the time it was found, the light from the flames piercing the blackness of the winter night like a beacon. A man walking his dog in the wood just after 3am spotted the glow from the fire first, followed by a couple who had parked their car nearby hoping for a quiet kiss and a cuddle.

It took just minutes for Surrey firefighters to reach the scene on the outskirts of the town of Weybridge, but by then Syed Ali Mahmoodi-Oskui was so disfigured as to be unrecognisable. It took police weeks to identify him using DNA and dental records; his family were advised not to view his body.

The motive for his murder was initially unclear. Known as Ali to his friends, the 27-year-old scion of a rich Pakistani family had always been a dapper dresser in life, habitually wearing a Rolex watch and a distinctive gold necklace. But when he was found, wrapped in a green sleeping bag and dumped in a thicket near a stream, both were missing.

The flames that had blackened his features had not actually killed him, however. His death had resulted from a vicious beating, a post mortem found, probably administered just hours before his remains were found.

Soon the police had their suspects. Prime amongst them was Rizwan Alvi, a 24-year-old Pakistani American and Ali’s close friend.

Rizwan’s mobile phone records placed it, and therefore him, at the scene of the murder, which police decided had been his modelling agency, situated off Oxford Street in central London. Later that night the phone had also moved to the Weybridge area.

Records of a series of calls made at the time between Rizwan’s phone and that belonging to another man, Nouman al-Mussaoui, who worked at the agency, implicated them both in the crime.

Following the murder a group of men including Rizwan and Nouman had run up thousands of pounds on Ali’s credit cards, frittering money away on buying clothes and ordering lavish meals in restaurants.

More than a year later, Rizwan was arrested in Canada. At his trial at the Old Bailey the telephone records formed a central plank of the case against him, together with the fact that a pair of jeans, apparently found in his wife’s suitcase, showed traces of Ali’s DNA.

The motive for the killing, the court was told, was an attempt to extort money from the victim, leading to a strongarming which had gone tragically awry.

It looked like an open and shut prosecution, the end result of a crime against a man whose faceless corpse exemplified the anonymous nature of the case. Sentencing Rizwan to life in prison following the jury’s decision to convict, the judge told him he would serve at least 18 years behind bars.

The prosecution presented Rizwan, and most of the people he associated with as unsavoury characters. They had been embroiled in a world which most Londoners never see, yet which lies just beneath the surface of the capital’s West End.

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