Edmond Safra death takes another twist
Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2005 12:37 pmJuly 31, 2005 <br>Sunday Times<br>The plot to kill the banker<br>Matthew Campbell, Paris<br> <br> <br> <br>THE circumstances surrounding the death of Edmond Safra, the billionaire banker who died in a fire in a Monaco penthouse five years ago, are to be re- examined in court when a male nurse found guilty of starting the blaze goes on trial for escaping from prison. <br><br>According to his lawyer, Ted Maher, the American nurse who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2002, will reveal details of a conspiracy against Safra. The banker died after locking himself in a “panic room” where he choked on fumes from the blaze. <br><br> <br> <br>“Ted is going to tell what really happened that night,” said Mike Griffith, an American lawyer famous for helping his fellow countrymen who get into trouble overseas. <br><br>Maher will testify that masked intruders broke into Safra’s apartment, apparently determined to kill or kidnap the banker who had Parkinson’s disease and needed constant care. The intruders fled after Maher, 47, a former Green Beret commando, struggled with one of them and was injured. <br><br>His account is certain to give a new lease of life to conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Safra, who was one of the world’s richest men. He employed private bodyguards but they had been given the night off on the evening of the fire. Videotape from a closed-circuit camera in the apartment mysteriously went missing. <br><br>Safra left most of his £3 billion fortune to his wife Lily, who later moved to London. The re-examination of the evidence coincides with efforts by a lawyer acting for her to force the withdrawal from sale of Empress Bianca, a novel by Lady Colin Campbell. The book, which the publishers say was a work of fiction, was regarded as a thinly veiled attack on her life which defamed her. <br><br>Maher’s story is stranger than fiction. He confessed to stabbing himself in the leg and side so as to emerge as a hero and be rewarded for “rescuing” Safra. He said that he had lit paper in a rubbish bin to set off a smoke alarm and summon help but the fire blazed out of control and firemen took longer to arrive than he had expected. <br><br>According to Griffith, however, Maher says his confession was extracted under pressure. He had told police about the intruders on the day of the fire but a lawyer advised him not to mention it again. “He was told that things would go really badly for him if he stuck to that story,” said Griffith. “Now he wants the truth to come out.” <br><br>According to Griffith, Maher claims that he was abducted in Nice in December 1999, a few days before the blaze in the Monaco penthouse. He says that he was bundled into a van at gunpoint and told that “something is going to happen” in Safra’s flat and that he should not interfere. <br><br>The men told him that the nurses’ rota had been changed so that he would be on duty on the night they were referring to. It was not clear why the men wanted Maher, who unlike Safra’s other nurses had been employed for only a short time. <br><br>Maher says he told Safra to shut himself in his room after the intruders had fled. Safra told Maher to raise the alarm. Lighting a fire was the only way the nurse could think of doing that, he claims. As it raged, Lily telephoned her husband in his panic room, urging him to come out. <br><br>Safra refused to do so, apparently convinced a hit squad was waiting to kill him. He succumbed to fumes along with Vivian Torrente, another nurse. <br><br>Maher claims pressure was put on him to confess that he had made up the story about the intruders. At one point police waved his wife’s passport under his nose saying, “We’ve got your wife”, and urging him to sign a statement that he alone was responsible for the fire. <br><br>The confession document was in French, a language Maher does not understand. He was imprisoned for unintentionally causing Safra’s death. He would have been eligible for release at the end of this year had it not been for his brief escape from prison with a fellow inmate in 2003, for which he faces a one-year sentence. <br><br>His case will be heard within the next few weeks. “He feels he has been very badly treated,” said Griffith, whose best known client was William Hayes, the subject of the Hollywood film Midnight Express about an American imprisoned in Turkey. “He is going to air this evidence in public for the first time because he wants the world to know what happened.”<br> <br> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1714899,00.html">www.timesonline.co.uk/new...99,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <p></p><i></i>