Spot-fixing trial: Amir and Majeed involved, says judge

Closing statements delivered as trial summed up in London.

LONDON: The fifteenth day of the spot-fixing trial saw Justice Cooke summing up after the lawyers of banned cricketers Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif had made their closing statements.

Butt and Asif are facing charges of conspiracy to cheat, and conspiracy to obtain and accept corrupt payments, following the Lord’s Test in August last year when they allegedly conspired with agent Mazhar Majeed and fast-bowler Mohammad Amir to bowl pre-planned no-balls. Butt and Asif deny the charges.

The judge began by directing the jury to deliberate for a verdict on the basis that Majeed and Amir were ‘involved in spot-fixing’.

“You can proceed on the basis that Majeed and Amir were involved in the spot-fixing at Lord’s,” he said. “But don’t be concerned by their absence from this trial. You should base your decision on the evidence alone and draw inferences, which I mean by drawing common sense conclusions.”

Earlier, Asif’s lawyer Alexander Milne made his closing statement, claiming that the evidence pointed to the involvement of Butt in the spot-fixing conspiracy.

Milne told the jury ‘to follow the money’ as ‘not a single note’ of the money handed out by the undercover journalist had ended with Asif, while both Butt and Majeed were found with the incriminating notes.

‘Not enough evidence to implicate Butt’

Butt’s lawyer Ali Bajwa told the jury that his client did not need to be involved in the fix for the allegedly pre-determined no-balls to have been delivered.

Bajwa suggested that Amir had been involved in the fixing and possibly Asif as well, but Butt did not need to be in on the fix for the no-balls to be bowled.

It was “part of Majeed’s embellishment to the undercover journalist to say ‘the captain is involved’,” Bajwa told the jury. He argued that as Asif had bowled the tenth over in the first-innings in the previous five Tests on the tour, Majeed only had to do his research on the bowling order patterns.

Bajwa asked the jury to consider if they had really heard enough genuine evidence that links Butt to the fixing.

“The prosecution has been working backwards from an assumption of guilt. Butt’s life has been torn apart to the point of analysing his bank records, his every move and even anything his mother does. If I worked backwards from any of your lives [the jury] I could find or twist things about what you have or might not have done. There simply isn’t enough evidence to find Butt guilty.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 26^th, 2011.