Four guilty over torture death of man set alight

Four people have been found guilty over charges relating to the death of a man doused in petrol and set on fire.

Tomasz Samel was kidnapped in 2019 from his Birmingham home by organised crime group members who believed he was responsible for the loss of illicit cigarettes valued at £1m. He was driven to the Liverpool area and brutally attacked.

Despite being set on fire and left in a rural area he managed to make his way to a property for help. He died in hospital three months later.

Tobiasz Kozlowski and Neil Jones were found guilty of murder. Two more men, Kevin Wooden and Kye Arthur, were cleared of murder but found guilty of manslaughter.

All four will be sentenced on 9 October.

Samel, also a member of an organised crime group, was kidnapped from his Handsworth home on the morning of 27 March by Wooden, 46, of Alma Road, Banbury, and Arthur, 35, of Copley Gardens, Bristol, and a third male.

They passed themselves off as Interpol officers executing a European arrest warrant.

Opening the trial at Birmingham Crown Court in June prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu KC said after he had been kidnapped, Samel had "falsely imprisoned, he was placed in a white Peugeot Boxer van and he was driven to Merseyside."

It was there where he was tortured and he was seriously harmed.

"As part of that torture his body was set on fire."

He was believed to have been naked and in a seated position when he was set alight, the court heard.

"After he was subjected to that torture, his body is likely to have been dumped in a remote rural location.

"Miraculously he was able to walk to the home of strangers who saw the state he was in and who called for an ambulance."

Samel was given water after knocking at the door of the property near Bickerstaffe at about 23:10 GMT that evening.

He was taken to Whiston Hospital in Prescot but died on 21 June as a result of his injuries.

Telling the court Wooden and Arthur were two of three men who went to Samel's Raleigh Close home in the van, Sandhu told the trial Samel was "not an angel, but he did not deserve to be tortured and to be killed."

His killing was linked to the seizure of counterfeit cigarettes that had been smuggled into the UK from Poland.

He had a unit in Elkington Street, Aston, where HMRC had seized cigarettes on 22 February 2019.

Jones, 48, of no fixed address, and Kozlowski, of Crosland Road, Kirkby, Merseyside, were said to have been present when Samel had been tortured and set on fire, while Wooden and Arthur had been "recruited" to become part of the planning.

Jones admitted he had paid the kidnappers £20,000 to take Samel.

West Midlands Police said it had established Kozlowski and Jones had led the plot to kidnap Samel.

The two men had been key figures in the cigarette smuggling operation, police said, and had travelled to Poland to discuss the loss of the 10 million cigarettes, and formulated a plan to kidnap him.

Wooden acquired the van that was used to drive Samel to his beating.

Ch Supt Scott Griffiths, who led the investigation for West Midlands Police, said Samel would have suffered an unimaginable amount of pain when he had been tortured.

"The violence that was inflicted on him does not bear thinking about, and those that were willing to do that to another human being are clearly very dangerous individuals."

The investigation had spanned many years and countries, he said, as police pieced together people's movements, mobile phone data, CCTV, and other information.

"This was a significant organised crime group, making millions of pounds through the illegal trade of cigarettes, with operations across a number of countries.

"Our investigation took us to Poland, Greece, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Columbia, France, and Scotland and Wales where these organised criminals had operations or fled to in the aftermath of the kidnap."

Kozlowski's wife, Sandra Kozlowska, 38, also from Kirkby, was convicted of assisting an offender after she helped her husband to avoid suspicion by depositing money in bank accounts for him and lying to the police.

Kozlowski and Jones pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kidnap and conspiracy to falsely imprison before the trial began. Jones also admitted manslaughter. They were also convicted of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.

Wooden and Arthur admitted conspiracy to kidnap and conspiracy to falsely imprison and were cleared of murder and conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.

Kate Seal, from the Crown Prosecution Service said Samel had been subjected to "horrendous violence" and what had happened to him had been a "brutal attack".

"Our thoughts remain with Mr Samel's family, who have endured unimaginable suffering, including witnessing his abduction from their family home.

"I hope these verdicts provide some measure of closure and reassurance that justice has been achieved."

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