Man jailed for false claims of VIP paedophile ring seeks to appeal conviction
Fantasist Carl Beech, who was jailed for 18 years for false claims of a VIP paedophile ring, has applied for permission to appeal his conviction and sentence.
The 51-year-old was convicted last month at Newcastle Crown Court of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud.
He has now applied to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal against both his conviction and sentence.
It will take around five months before Beech’s case is assessed by a single judge, who will decide whether to give the divorced father-of-one permission to have his appeal heard.
In a series of tearful interviews with Metropolitan Police detectives, Beech spun stories of sadistic abuse by public figures from the worlds of politics, the armed forces and security services.
A £2 million police investigation, called Operation Midland, was launched in 2014, but it ended in 2016 without a single arrest and caused massive embarrassment to the force when his claims were found to be false.
High profile figures including D-Day veteran Lord Bramall, former Tory MP Harvey Proctor and Lady Diana Brittan, the widow of former home secretary Leon Brittan, had their homes raided after detectives acted on Beech’s claims without fully testing his initial account.
The Metropolitan Police are facing claims by retired High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques that the warrants for the searches may have been obtained unlawfully, although a police watchdog found no evidence of misconduct or criminality by the officers involved.
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