but the man police believe organized the murder isn’t on trial and hasn’t even been named.
Bahman Faraji, 44, known to friends as Batman, was shot in the face outside a Liverpool pub last February 24.
Faraji worked as a nightclub doorman and was involved in a bitter dispute with a man who has not been named. But the prosecution says that man ordered that Faraji be killed. Why he is not on trial has not been explained, though there is speculation he is Iranian and left Britain for Iran after the killing.
None of those on trial is Iranian. The four men who went on trial last week are:
• Lee Dodson, 42, accused of recruiting some of those involved and helping to organize the killing.
• Brian Regan, 53, the former TV actor, who stands accused of driving the gunman to the scene and then whisking him away after the shooting. Regan appeared for 14 years in the 1980s and 1990s in a popular British television show, “Brookside,” playing the role of Terry Sullivan
• Edward Heffey, 40, who is accused of being the gunman who walked up to Faraji and shot him in the face after first making sure he had the right man by asking who he was.
• Simon Smart, 33, a friend of Faraji’s who is accused of luring him to the murder site with a telephone call.
All four men have pleaded innocent.
The prosecutor, Brian Cummings, said the man who ordered the killing cannot be named for legal reasons, but those reasons were not explained in court. Nor has the dispute that prompted the drive for Faraji’s murder been described yet.
Initially, the police had nothing to work from after the murder. They scoured surveillance camera tapes and quickly focused on a Ford Escort they believed had whisked the killer to safety. In less than 24 hours, they located the car. Regan, the former actor, was driving the car, which was registered to Dodson’s father.
Regan said he knew nothing about the crime and had just been driving a friend around town that night. But police say that the day after the killing Regan asked a friend to throw away a pair of gloves that he feared might have linked him to the crime, thereby implicating him in the plot and undermining his claim of innocence.
Regan did not name his passenger, Heffey. But Heffey was identified as the gunman by an eyewitness to the shooting. Police checked his cellphone and found he made a call to Smart just after the shooting and that Smart then called the unnamed man said to have ordered the murder. Fifteen minutes later, Heffey made another call and the phone was never used after that.
The police calculated that someone had to have lured Faraji to the site where Regan drove the gunman. They checked the last call made to Faraji’s cellphone and found it came from a pre-paid mobile with no registered owner. The phone had been activated only three weeks before the killing and had been used, with few exceptions, only to telephone the victim. It was not used after the murder, a tactic used by professional criminals.
The trial is expected to be a long one, lasting probably into December.
