Murder on the dancefloor
The killing of Wajahat Sheikh in a King's Cross nightclub is dimming from the memory and the police will no longer appeal for help – so has the killer got away with it?
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Today’s feature from Richard Osley looks back on an unsolved murder case which will dim from view unless we keep shouting about it every year. There is always a chance somebody might step forward and do the right thing.
THRILLER writers have been obsessed for generations about how to commit a perfect murder, coming up with the elaborate methods that their fictional killers might use to avoid detection.
It turns out all you once needed to do was punch and kick somebody in front of hundreds of people on a dancefloor, and then let the security bundle you out of the nightclub doors and to freedom.
This is how, it is now assumed, the suspect who killed a 21-year-old student inside the most popular nightspot in King’s Cross escaped a police dragnet more than two decades ago.
And he wasn’t just freed into the cold night air that fateful night in February 2002, the mystery man has never been traced since.
Wherever he is, if he is still alive, he must be glad that this killing has been largely forgotten and, as cold cases go, you might need a hefty ice pick to break open the deep-frozen police investigation.
As trite as it sounds, this is the story of a murder on the dancefloor.
There’s perhaps a clue to why so few people remember the death of Wajahat Sheikh in the only photo of him which has ever surfaced. It’s a passport picture, with a crease – the best Scotland Yard could offer when officers first began appealing for help.
There is no catalogue of photos charting his life, no in-depth interviews with his relatives or friends telling us what he was like, and with it no reminder to detectives that they have an unsolved case to crack.
Some murders capture national attention irrespective of method or geography, but a creased passport photo is unlikely to set keyboards singing in newsrooms.
It has been put to me once or twice over the years that his ethnicity is also a factor. Wajahat, also known as Junaid to some friends, was originally from Libya, where his family was still living.
That’s a hornet’s nest if you want to go there but I remember the words of an old friend and mentor, the late David St George, the Old Bailey’s longest-ever correspondent who died in 2023.
In the pub opposite the courthouse where he’d go for a lunch time pint, always living up to his image as a hardened seen-it-all crime writer, he told me he once used to have no problem selling court copy to news providers up and down the country and every single murder was considered a story.
That interest, he said, began slowing by the end of the 1990s if the names of victims sounded Asian or African. These cases would make an inch, if that, of newsprint.
Certainly, it seems like every unsolved murder in London has at some stage featured in a ghoulish true crime podcast somewhere along the line, but Wajahat’s demise has not yet been seen as a likely ratings winner – even though I’ve already given them the obvious title with this post.
You don’t have to be the world’s greatest cynic to believe that if he had been the white son of an earl, maybe it would have been different,
There may well have been a less abrupt, final response when I checked in on the police for an anniversary article around 2008.
Despite previous pledges to never give up and so on, there would be no fresh public appeal, came the weary answer from the comms official that day, who simply said: “All lines of inquiry into the murder of Wajahat Sheikh were pursued with a negative result. The case was closed. If further evidence comes to light it will be investigated.”
That last bit, about a new lead, is why the New Journal and the Islington Tribune each year publishes the passport photo and a reminder that out there possibly still sleeps a killer. We did it again earlier this month as 23 years passed by. It’s not an ‘important’ anniversary with a zero or a five at the end, but an achingly long time nonetheless.
So what did happen on May 19, 2002, at the Cookies and Cream special at the Scala, the club which stands like a lighthouse at the corner of Pentonville Road? At least 600 young people were enjoying the r’n’b and garage music inside, and there had been a performance by Ms Dynamite, who in 2002 was enjoying a breakthrough year in which she won the Mercury Prize and three MOBO awards.
It’s probably important to say that she wasn’t on stage at the time of the incident and we mention who was on the bill just to explain the popularity of the event.
Another factor to remember is that back then we were in the infant stages of mobile phone cameras. It still seemed rather amazing at that time that you could capture an image with the same box you made phone calls, but even so these pictures were often little more than grainy outlines and not much use at all in the surrounds of a nightclub.
Even today, when we have phones capable of snapping punchy shots in low light and sending them on to others in a second on WhatsApp or Snapchat, many nightclubs in London do not allow use of cameras at all under threat of being removed. At some, door staff apply stickers to phone lenses as you go in. It ensures people can let their hair down so to speak, without fear of being photographed.
While there were not scores of camera phones clicking in the Scala that night in 2002, there was by chance an amateur videographer capturing the evening’s entertainment.
Their film was analysed by detectives and Wajahat could be seen making what would be his final steps, crossing the dancefloor, but not the fatal blow to his head.
“It does not show who was responsible,” Detective Chief Inspector Norman McKinlay later told a coroner’s inquest.
It is a bad sign, by the way, when the subject of a murder inquiry becomes the subject of a coroner’s inquest.
An ‘unlawful killing’ verdict was recorded at St Pancras Coroner’s Court in May 2003, but these hearings usually only get the go-ahead to take place once detectives feel they have exhausted their chief lines of inquiry. We might have guessed then, just a year after Wajahat had died, that his killer was likely to have got away for good.
This may all seem rather negative about Mr McKinlay’s team, when anybody who held a police badge back then will remember that they conducted more than 480 interviews and ended up arresting ten men. An identity parade was organised for these suspects, but nothing stuck – and all were released.
Mr McKinlay, and I use ‘mister’ because he retired the following year and so now have most of his contemporaries, was an experienced investigator whose cases included finally bringing John Sweeney, ‘the scalp hunter’, to justice. That story was recently dramatised for ITV’s Until I Kill You, following the survivor of a construction worker who had killed and dismembered two other former girlfriends, one found in the waterway in Camden Town and another in Rotterdam.