Crack police lose dead officer in toilet

When a senior drugs officer with Britain’s ‘FBI’ went missing, his colleagues were baffled. The Serious Organised Crime Agency, admired for its investigative skills and hi-tech crime-fighting abilities, marshalled its resources in the hunt. If only they had checked the toilets. Two ‘extensive searches’ of the offices failed to turn up anything and, 16 hours after he was last seen, the officer’s colleagues called his wife and told her she should report him missing to local police.

He was eventually found at 4am the next day by a security guard on his regular rounds, who noticed the toilet cubicle door had been shut for a ‘considerable time’. The guard then called Soca officers who kicked down the door and found their colleague dead on the toilet, just a few metres from his desk in the London offices of the agency.



Bosses have since ordered that 10cm (4in) be lopped off the bottom of cubicle doors so they could easily check if anyone was trapped. The agency, which employs 4,200 staff and has 40 offices in Britain, refused to confirm when the officer was found dead earlier this year, but a source said he ‘vanished’ after going to the toilet at 12pm.

The source said his colleague, a team leader in charge of Soca’s Interpol drugs desk, was not found until the early hours the next day. He added that Soca was ‘staffed by brand new, inexperienced staff who are keen to assist but who have little, if any, background experience in law enforcement work’. A police source, who has worked in the Met for 15 years, said: ‘How these guys can be called Britain’s FBI when they can’t even find their own officer 50ft from his desk is an embarrassment.’