A former member of the Metropolitan Police who was accused of raping a woman 19 years ago has been found not guilty.
Stephen Kyere, who is 57 years old, was accused of having s*x with the woman without her permission on April 12, 2004, after a night out at the Oceana club in Kingston-upon-Thames.
The case was reopened after the woman wrote to the Metropolitan Police commissioner at the time, Dame Cressida Dick, in 2018 about how she still felt “injustice” even though the case had been closed for years.
Mr. Kyere, who is from Ashford, Surrey, was found to be a suspect after CCTV footage from the club and a sample of semen found on the woman’s pillow matched his DNA.
The defendant, who was off duty at the time of the event and has since left the Metropolitan Police, had denied rape and indecent assault.
After he was tried again at the Old Bailey, a jury took six hours and twenty minutes to decide that he was not guilty of the charges.
Jurors were told that the woman went to the police at the time and was checked out by a doctor, who didn’t find any injuries that would either back up or disprove her story.
In August 2004, the woman got a call from the police telling her that they were going to arrest a suspect. She didn’t hear anything else, and the case was dropped in 2006 without a suspect being found.
Insisted S*x Was Consensual Stephen Kyere:
In 2018, when she was in her early 40s, the woman wrote to the Metropolitan Police commissioner to complain about the “injustice” of the probe.
Even though a lot of the original evidence had been lost by then, the case was reopened and stills from the nightclub’s CCTV were found.
From there, the police found Mr. Kyere by comparing images from CCTV with pictures of all black or black-ethnic minority cops named Stephen who were working at the time.
The tweet below confirms that there was a case on
Ex-Met Police officer, Stephen Kyere, faces rape case retrial https://t.co/S7cK6CUnSF
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 9, 2023
In January 2020, he was asked to come to an interview under caution and gave a written statement saying he had never had s*xual contact without his consent.
His DNA was checked, and a sample from the woman’s duvet matched his.
In a second statement, Mr. Kyere said that he remembered the event and that the s*x was voluntary.
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In March, the Old Bailey jury was sent home because they couldn’t decide what to do about the case. In May, Judge Lynn Tayton KC presided over a three-day review.
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