The Incident
According to some witness accounts, a group of around ten Liverpool F.C. football fans, including Shields, engaged in a drunken fracas in the seaside resort in the early hours of the morning. When Georgiev came out of the cafe in which he worked as a barman to investigate, he was knocked down, kicked and punched repeatedly by at least three people. While he was lying on the ground, the questioned witness accounts claim Shields struck him on the head with an object. Shields and three other men, Bradley Thompson, Graham Sankey and Anthony Wilson, were arrested and charged with the attack.
Thompson and Wilson were convicted of lesser offences and given non-custodial sentences. Sankey was released without charge. Back in the UK, he 'confessed' to being the attacker, not Shields; Sankey later retracted his statement. Nine witnesses, both Bulgarian and British, later testified at the trial and many of them — including Georgiev himself — positively identified Shields (in an identity parade and in the court) as a person present at the crime scene and as the perpetrator of the crime.
A thorough review of witness accounts, together with the opportunity to interview Shields and a number of key witnesses, was undertaken by the author and playwright Kevin Sampson and led to a feature published in British Sunday broadsheet The Observer in June 2007.
Read more about this topic: Conviction Of Michael Shields
Famous quotes containing the word incident:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.... I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)