A British man arrested in Malta in connection with a brutal 2003 murder will face extradition proceedings, a court ruled on Saturday, despite his insistence that he was not the man wanted by police.
Christopher Guest More, 41, had been on Europe’s ‘most wanted’ list and was arrested on Thursday, after a covert operation involved Maltese and British police.
But, arraigned in court on Saturday, the arrested man identified himself as Andrew Christopher Lamb, a trader living in Swieqi, and presented a British passport and birth certificate attesting to this identity.
Mr More is wanted by British police over the Cheshire murder of Brian Waters, who was tortured and beaten to death in front of his two adult children, forced to watch the murder at gunpoint. Three other men are already serving life sentences after being convicted of the murder.
The prosecution insisted on Saturday that Andrew Christopher Lamb was merely the latest in a series of false identities that Mr More had used to evade justice for 16 years, and that British authorities had confirmed that the only real person bearing that name resided in a medical institution in the UK.
George Camilleri from the Attorney General’s office, leading the prosecution, said British police had identified the arrested man as Mr More on the basis of photographs, and that a fingerprint comparison proved a match. The passport under another name, he said, had been obtained by means of false declarations to British authorities.
Despite objections by the defence over the admissibility of this evidence, the court concluded that the arrested man was indeed Mr More, and said proceedings could begin for him to be extradited to the UK.
Defence lawyer Arthur Azzopardi had argued that the fingerprint evidence was not admissible as police had sought court authorisation only to take the fingerprints, and not to carry out the comparison.
He argued that the witness statements from British police identifying the man on the basis of photographs amounted to “nothing more than opinion” and that the only concrete evidence the court had to rely on was the passport and birth certificate attesting to the identity the man claimed.
Mr More is alleged to have been one of four men who carried out the murder in 2003, storming a derelict property where Mr Waters was running a cannabis farm, in a row over drug debts.
The men tied Mr Waters to a chair before battering him in front of his son Gavin, who was also attacked, and daughter Natalie, who had just turned 21 and was held at gunpoint and forced to watch.