By Charlie Charalambous
THREE British soldiers serving life for killing Danish tour guide Louise Jensen yesterday abandoned an appeal to have their convictions overturned.
When appeal proceedings got under way at the Supreme Court last May, the three ex-soldiers were aiming to walk free by overturning their convictions on legal technicalities.
Now lawyers have dropped this approach, they will instead concentrate on having their clients’ sentences reduced.
Justin Fowler, 30, from Falmouth, Alan Ford, 29, from Birmingham and Geoff Pernell, 27, from Oldbury, West Midlands were jailed for life without remission in March 1996 for the abduction and manslaughter of Jensen four years ago.
“We decided it would be more beneficial if we concentrated on the issue of sentencing, since we were not able to overrule the abduction, conspiracy to abduct and attempted rape charges,” Pernell’s lawyer Antonis Andreou said yesterday.
Legal arguments will now focus on the length of sentence, which the defence lawyers have described as “excessively harsh” and “unprecedented” for a manslaughter conviction.
“A life sentence under any circumstances is unacceptable,” said Fowler’s lawyer Christos Pourgourides after yesterday’s brief Supreme Court hearing.
The average sentence for manslaughter in Cyprus is around 15 years, which means the three former British soldiers could be released in five years as the sentence would be counted from the time of their arrest.
Furthermore, the prison year is in fact only nine months, and at each presidential election a quarter of the sentence is chopped off (the next one is 2002).
Initially, the prosecution had applied to have fresh evidence put before the Supreme Court with the testimony of retired British detective Michael Flack.
Flack – who last year served time in the same Nicosia Central Prison as the Jensen killers – claimed that Fowler had confessed to him that he killed the 23-year-old tour guide.
Andreou and Ford’s lawyer, Tassos Katsikides, supported the prosecution’s request.
But Pourgourides objected to the request. The Supreme Court agreed to the objection, ruling that Flack’s testimony served no purpose as fresh evidence could not be introduced after the trial.
During the criminal trial, one of the longest and most expensive in Cypriot legal history, the three soldiers declined to testify; their police statements were submitted as evidence.
Jensen was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten to death with a spade after being abducted from a petrol station in Ayia Napa on September 13, 1994.
Her naked and battered body was found two days later in a shallow grave, a few hundred yards away from a police station.
The appeal hearing continues tomorrow.
