What really happened to the Yaohirou audio?

One of the longest-standing bits of ‘evidence’ that the Hoaxtead pushers like to spew about is the alleged ‘police cover-up’ of the recording that Abraham’s brother-in-law made at his home, the night Abe and Ella brought the children home from Morocco.

They point to paragraphs 107–108 of Mrs Justice Pauffley’s judgement to verify this allegation:

107. It is a curious fact that prior to the launch of these proceedings, no police officer had listened to the audio recording made by Jean Clement Yaohirou or watched the film clips of the children. DI Cannon made inquiries at my request to discover that DC Rogers, the member of his team who received the film clips and the audio recording from Mr Yaohirou, had sent them to a property store in Chingford. The focus would appear to have been upon arranging almost immediate ABE interviews.

108. I say no more at this stage than that the police and social services inquiry could have taken an entirely different course if attention had been given to those recordings. At the very least, the questions asked of P and Q at interview would have been directed towards other areas of interest.

On the face of it, sending the Yaohirou audio to a police storage facility in Chingford does seem like an odd move. Why would the Barnet police have done such a thing? Was it incompetence, some sort of bureaucratic mix-up, or was there really an attempt made to cover up the content of the audio recording?

Mrs Justice Pauffley doesn’t elaborate much on this, and it’s been a question mark for some time.

That is, until DrifLoud cleared it up for us via one of his Twitter rants, brought to our attention by Dave, a regular commenter here:

Here are the pieces of Jean-Clement’s testimony, as published by Drippy (we’ve redacted some side-notes that identify the children):

Drippy is contending that when Barnet police stated that they hadn’t listened to the recording, they were lying.

However, reading Jean-Clement’s testimony more carefully, the real picture becomes clear: he’d initially called Scotland Yard, since he took Abe’s word for it that Haringey police might have been ‘in on the cult’. Scotland Yard then recommended that Jean-Clement call his own local constabulary, which happened to be Waltham Forest Police.

Thus it was Waltham Forest police officers who came to his house the next morning, listened to the recording, and decided to remove the phone for further study. According to Jean-Clement, they were the ones who took the phone to Chingford.

This has quite a different implication than if Barnet police had originally listened to the Yaohirou recording as part of their criminal investigation, and had at that time arbitrarily decided to send it to the police storage facility in Chingford, which is miles away from Barnet.

In fact, while it doesn’t speak well for internal police communications across London boroughs, the real story sounds to us much less like ‘deliberate cover-up’ and much more like ‘left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing’.

What if Barnet police had listened the Yaohirou recording?

In fact, it’s a shame that the Yaohirou audio was not immediately viewed by Barnet police at the time when they were first alerted to Abe and Ella’s outlandish claims, and were investigating whether they were true, whether the children had been abused, and if so, who was responsible for that.

As Mrs Justice Pauffley intimated in her judgement, “the police and social services inquiry could have taken an entirely different course if attention had been given to those recordings” as part of the criminal investigation. It’s pretty clear from her statements that she felt that had the Yaohirou video been considered by Barnet police, charges would most likely have been laid against Abe and Ella.

Unfortunately, this did not happen.

The Yaohirou recording was used later, in the child custody fact-finding hearing, but not in the initial criminal investigation, where it could have been used as the foundation of a strong case against Abe and Ella.

If it had been, this entire hoax might never have gathered the momentum that it did; Ella might not have had the opportunity to distribute the videos she and Abe made to Sabine McNeill and Araya Soma; and both Abe and Ella might have been forced to face the full penalty of law for abusing the children and attempting to pervert the course of justice.