'I am no murderer' Pressure grows to re-examine evidence in fatal stabbing

When the 18-year-old Wahab Zaaki was found bleeding to death from five stab wounds on an east London estate, police were under pressure to find his killer.

- Emily Dugan

It was spring 2009 and knife crime in the capital had been branded an epidemic. Zaaki was one of four teenagers killed in separate incidents in London over just three days that March.

For the last 13 years, Kai Shannon has been in prison on a life sentence after being convicted of Zaaki's murder and the wounding of another gang member. He has always insisted he is innocent. Shannon was among a group of young men who were hanging around stairwell 13 of the Attlee Terrace estate in Walthamstow that night. He was 17 and he and Zaaki were junior members of a local gang known as the DM crew.

At the time of Shannon's arrest he told anyone who would listen that he was innocent – that he had not been in the stairwell during the fatal stabbing – but the evidence of another member of the gang was key to securing his conviction.

While there were witnesses and phone records that put Shannon in the stairwell in the hours before the attack, the only person to testify to the events of the stabbing itself was a fellow gang member who had been initially arrested for the murder but not charged.

Two years later – after being contacted regularly by the police, who told him he would receive help finding accommodation if he became a witness – the man said Shannon had killed Zaaki.

No DNA linked Shannon to the crime and no motive was ever established.

Now 32, Shannon is still serving an indeterminate life sentence with a minimum term of 18 years but has hope that his insistence on his innocence is being heard by those with the power to get his conviction reconsidered.

His case is being championed by the former British Transport Police detective superintendent Graham Satchwell, who helped victims gather vital evidence against the corrupt police officer Derek Ridgewell. It has also been taken on by academics and students at the University of Manchester's Innocence Project.