Madiba , Thanks for the posting
What a shame
This is simply lynching . Period
Habib
Madiba Saidy wrote:
> THE LONDON INDEPENDENT 25 JANUARY 2000
>
> In a small English town, two black men are found hanged. Could they be the
> victims of racist killers?
>
> By Ian Burrell, Home Affairs Correspondent
>
> 25 January 2000
>
> Harold and Jason McGowan were young men who had everything to live for.
>
> Both men lived in Telford in Shropshire; Harold, 32, was a builder and
> father of three children and Jason, his 20-year-old nephew, worked on a
> local newspaper. He had recently married and bought his first house. But
> within six months of each other, both were found hanged and today the deaths
> are being investigated after claims they were victims of racially motivated
> murders.
>
> Michael Mansfield, the leading human rights barrister who acted for the
> family of Stephen Lawrence, has agreed to represent the men's family in
> their fight for the truth, while West Mercia Police have acknowledged the
> "unusual" nature of the deaths and confirmed that the dead men had been the
> subject of racial harassment.
>
> Friends believe the hangings were the work of a "lynch mob" and, as Jason
> was buried last weekend at a small Pentecostal church, the talk among the
> shocked and bewildered congregation was that this was the calculated work of
> a gang of racist killers.
>
> Harold was discovered dead in an empty house with the flex of an iron around
> his neck on July 2 last year. Six months later, on New Year's Day, Jason,
> who had been trying to investigate his uncle's death, was found hanging from
> roadside railings outside a leisure centre in Telford. The deaths followed
> what the family claims was a sustained campaign of harassment: Harold had,
> on several occasions, told police he believed his life was in danger. An
> inquest with a jury will open next month into his death.
>
> Last night Harold's brother Clifton said the family was unhappy with the
> police's initial response to the death. He said: "We are convinced that both
> Harold and Jason were killed by racists. They had no reason to take their
> own lives."
>
> He added that neither of the men had left suicide notes. However, no
> evidence has yet been uncovered directly to link a third party with either
> death. Detective Chief Inspector Ken Crane, who is leading the investigation
> into Jason's death, said he was keeping an "open mind". He said: "As far as
> the death is concerned, it is suspicious in as much as it is a death that we
> have not got an answer to. It is very unusual to find deaths in a similar
> fashion in the same family in such a short space of time."
>
> Harold McGowan became a target for racists while working part-time as a pub
> doorman, where he was strict in refusing entry to people banned by the
> management. His tormentors began following him around, shouting abuse and
> pointing their fingers at him in the shape of a gun. He received telephone
> calls at work saying: "You're as good as dead."
>
> Clifton McGowan said: "It was like a Chinese torture. A drip, drip effect.
> If Harold was walking in the street, they would go up to him and say things
> like, 'You're dead, nigger'. The McGowans' solicitor, Errol Robinson, said
> Harold made a series of complaints to the police that he was being
> victimised, although he never made a formal statement.
>
> Mr Robinson said: "We have a transcript of one of his calls to the police in
> which he said, 'I am basically saying that I feel in fear of my life'." He
> said Harold had been told that he was on a "death list" drawn up by
> far-right extremists.
>
> Harold was found dead in a house which he had been minding for a friend who
> was on holiday in America.
>
> In the weeks afterwards, his nephew Jason, who worked as part of the
> production team at the Shrewsbury Chronicle, began making his own inquiries
> around town about the circumstances in which his uncle had died and the
> people who had been taunting him. On 2 December, Clifton McGowan received an
> anonymous call on his mobile telephone. The caller said: "If you don't back
> off, one of the McGowans will be sorted out."
>
> Jason had been married for only four months when he went out to celebrate
> New Year's Eve with his wife, Sinead, at the Elephant and Castle pub in
> Telford. He seemed happy and boisterous, buying cigars for his friends in
> preparation for the countdown to the new millennium and ordering cocktails.
>
> Half an hour before midnight, he took Sinead outside for some fresh air. She
> became cold and went back inside. When she came back for him at five to
> midnight he was gone, and searches and calls to his mobile phone failed to
> locate him. The next morning his body was found dangling from the railings
> outside the nearby Ketley Leisure Centre.
>
> Clifton said: "Jason was very articulate and always kept diaries. We feel
> that if he had been planning anything like this he would have sat down and
> written something. But this was like a public hanging. It was by the side of
> the road. Close to where his mother went to work and where his younger
> brother went to school."
>
> The double tragedy has devastated a family that came to England from the
> rural St Thomas district of Jamaica in 1962. Within a year, they had moved
> from Wolverhampton and settled in Wellington - a small Shropshire market
> town that was later to be absorbed into Telford New Town.
>
> Both Harold and Jason were born and grew up in Wellington. Shropshire's
> ethnic minority population - which largely consists of the 5,000 Asian,
> Chinese and Afro-Caribbeans in Telford - is one of the smallest and most
> isolated in the country.
>
> The Telford deaths have sent shockwaves through Britain's black community.
> "Lynch mob Hits Family," The Voice newspaper reported yesterday. And even if
> the circumstances of the McGowan tragedies remain for ever a mystery, the
> fact remains that some black people now believe that the lynch mobs of
> segregationist America are at large in 21st-century Britain.
>
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