‘Set up by my own gang’: man convicted of London stabbing in 2009 looks to reopen case
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Exclusive: Kai Shannon has always maintained his innocence. There is now growing pressure to re-examine evidence with a former police officer on his side. When 18-year-old Wahab Zaaki was found bleeding to death from five stab wounds on an east London estate, police were under immense pressure to find his killer.
![[Emily Dugan]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2022/08/30/Emily_Dugan.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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 over just three days in London 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.
![[Graham Satchwell in a rural area ]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/799effec970801686278638d7ca1191c1e3896a5/0_448_6495_3897/master/6495.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Shannon was among a large 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 not guilty – that he had not been in the stairwell during the fatal stabbing – but the evidence of another gang member was key to securing his conviction.
![[Kai Shannon’s mother, Bianca Simpson, sitting on a sofa]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9be0bb6c344ffc19bfd93caa2344180b978eaed3/0_347_6000_3600/master/6000.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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 one fellow gang member. He had been injured that night and was 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.
