How a coldblooded restaurant murder of a popular waiter left a once-peaceful island community living in fear

Daily Mail​

15 hours ago

The aroma of exotic spices wafting from the kitchen blended with the animated chatter of diners as they tucked into their meals at the Mumutaz Tandoori restaurant on a warm June evening in 1994.
Thursdays were always busy at the only Indian restaurant in Orkney, tucked away down a side street in Kirkwall where couples and families would meet for a catch-up and a curry.
But shortly after 7pm, the air of calm conviviality was shattered by an act of terrifying violence, the repercussions of which are still being felt today – not least by those who witnessed it.
Among them, a teenager called Emma was being treated to dinner out with her parents. Speaking for the first time about that fateful night in a new Prime Video documentary, Emma, now in her 40s, recalls: 'I was 13 when it happened. My parents at the time worked in Kirkwall so we had arranged to meet for tea. We liked the restaurant; it was dad's favourite. In those days I used to have a masala.'
Her memories of what happened next are vivid but fractured. Sitting at a table by the window, she thought the person was collecting a takeaway: 'They were quite well-built and they had a sort of purposeful march on them. I couldn't see who it was because they had their face covered. I remember it was a handgun and then there was a 'pop'.'
She adds: 'I knew something bad had happened, I knew something had happened to the waiter but my brain I don't think wanted to believe it.'
The waiter, Shamsuddin Mahmood, had no time to utter even a greeting before the masked stranger aimed a 9mm pistol at his head and fired a single, fatal shot at point-blank range before turning on his heels and slipping away into the midsummer light.
In an instant, panic and fear gripped the room. For Emma, that fear has never left her, that single moment of horror triggering in her years of all-consuming anxiety. Now, more than 30 years later, she tells the makers of The Orkney Assassin: Murder In The Isles: 'The night it happened, it took the world from being a very safe place, an idyllic place, to a very frightening place where bad things happened, terrible things happened to people.'
She adds: 'People were telling me to enjoy every moment of my day because I was lucky to be alive. But I started getting quite frightened. I had panic attacks and I remember a car went past me and they had the window open and I was frightened quite irrationally that somebody could shoot me through the window. Everything was acutely frightening.'
Looking at a photograph of Mr Mahmood, she says: 'I remember he had a big smile in real life. He was really friendly and kind. I've never been able to make sense of what happened that night, but especially the cold-hearted nature of it.
'There was no hesitation. Shamsuddin was killed. Why did that happen?' Emma was far from the only person struggling to piece together this unfathomable shooting.
How could anyone commit such an outrageous murder – the first on Orkney's islands for a quarter century – in such a public manner and then simply vanish like a ghost?
The case became infamous, not least because of its tortuous route to justice, but also because of the astonishing truth of the killer's identity.
In 2008, at the end of an extraordinary 14-year murder inquiry that gripped the intricately woven Orkney community, and at times threatened to tear it apart, a decorated Black Watch soldier and member of a well-known local family, was convicted of Mr Mahmood's murder. Michael Ross was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in jail, yet over the years questions have been raised over his conviction.
Evidence was circumstantial; descriptions of the killer suggested he was taller than Ross's 5ft 7ins. Most controversially, Ross was only 15 years old at the time of the killing – just two years older than Emma.
It led some to dub him 'the schoolboy assassin', others to protest that no child could possibly be responsible for such a professional contract-style killing.
While there were claims Ross, now 46, had no motive, prosecutors suggested he had been heard around that time to say 'blacks should be shot and have a gun put to their head'.
Now decades on, the documentary explores the devastating impact this astonishing story has had not only on individuals like Emma, but on the entire community of Orkney – examining why it took so long for the killer to be unmasked in court and why there are still those who are convinced Michael Ross is the unfortunate victim of a miscarriage of justice.
The 90-minute programme touches on how a local wall of silence, the toxic whiff of racism and the criminal interference of Ross's own policeman father contrived to turn what might have been a relatively straightforward murder hunt into one of the longest in Scottish criminal history.
And while Ross lost an appeal in 2012, and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled two years later that there was not enough evidence to support another, a local campaign group based in Orkney continues to protest Ross's innocence and work tirelessly for his release.
They include his parents, who have stood loyally by him down the years.
In one dramatic moment, Ross's mother Moira remembers confronting her teenage son after he was first interviewed by police weeks after the killing.
'He went up to his room and sat there, and I did go up and ask him.' she says. 'I said: 'Did you shoot that man?' And he said: 'No'. I just can't get over the look on his face when I asked him,' she adds, breaking down in tears.
Mr Mahmood, an economics graduate from Bangladesh, was on his second stint working at the Mumtaz.
The 26-year-old had spent nine months in Orkney in 1993 and planned to work the summer season before returning to Bangladesh to marry his fiancée, a medical student.
One of 11 children, his older brother, barrister Abul Shafiuddin, said he had no enemies and was a kind-hearted man.
His seemingly motiveless killing on June 2, 1994, not only stunned the small, insular and peaceable Orkney community, but sent shockwaves rippling out across the world. Extra police were drafted in to lock down the island and secure the scene.
In the immediate aftermath, rumours were rife of a professional hit, of gambling debts or even of Mr Mahmood having an affair with a local woman, but nothing stacked up. Could it simply be down to the colour of his skin?
Amid concerns over racial tension towards the island's tiny Asian community, Moina Miah, the restaurant's owner, went into hiding under police guard with his wife and children.
'We are really scared in case whoever did this comes after us as well,' he said.
Instead, the murderer melted back into the 20,000-strong island population and for months, despite extensive publicity and a Crimewatch appeal, local police officers were stumped.
One, PC Edmund Ross, had been tasked with keeping curious onlookers away from the Bridge Street restaurant the morning after the murder.
A firearms expert with a keen interest in guns, Eddy Ross was a former Royal Green Jacket and Special Branch officer who once protected Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
The policeman was invited to examine the fatal bullet, which had wedged in the wall behind where Mr Mahmood fell. It turned out the 9mm calibre was from military ammunition supplied to the British Army in 1972 and exceedingly rare.
PC Ross was tasked with checking all the 9mm guns on Orkney, but he found none capable of firing the bullet, nor any stocks of the same ammunition anywhere on the island.
Yet ten weeks into the inquiry, the officer stunned detectives by casually mentioning that he owned a sealed box of similar bullets provided to him by James Spence, a retired Royal Marine and road sweeper.
The officer claimed there was only one box, but Mr Spence told police he had supplied two, one of which was open.
He further claimed the officer had asked him to lie on three occasions about the bullets. There was a further twist: PC Ross was Michael Ross's father.
By this time, police were already eyeing the younger Ross with suspicion. Two weeks prior to the shooting he had been seen in a local area known as Papdale Woods wearing similar clothing to the killer and carrying out military-type exercises.
Taken in for questioning, Ross ultimately accepted he was the person seen in Papdale Woods.
The family home was searched and a notebook with a swastika and an SS symbol written on it was found, along with the words 'death to the English'. A balaclava was also discovered.
Days before the killing, it would emerge, Ross was among a group of youths seen shouting racist abuse and threats at the 26-year-old waiter outside the restaurant.
Yet Ross claimed to have an alibi for the night and said he was in another part of Kirkwall at the time. Ultimately, in the absence of forensic, DNA or fingerprint evidence – or a murder weapon, which was never found – prosecutors decided not to proceed.
Instead, it was Eddy Ross who faced trial in 1997, and the disgraced policeman received a four-year jail sentence after being found guilty of attempting to defeat the ends of justice in relation to the boxes of bullets. He spent two years behind bars, lost his police job and later reinvented himself as an undertaker.
Meanwhile, his son was also building a new life for himself.
As a teenager, he had been fascinated by guns and the military encouraged by his father, who had a large collection of hardware and even gave him a deactivated machine gun as a present.
He once surprised a girlfriend by claiming he had one of his father's guns in his pocket.
A year after Mr Mahmood's murder, Ross, a crack shot, joined the Black Watch and saw active military combat, becoming the sergeant of a sniper platoon.
In 2004 his armoured vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
Ross put himself in danger to administer first aid before organising the evacuation of his wounded men and was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery.
When one black soldier under his command died, he openly wept. In his role as a soldier, he once guarded the Queen. He also married and had two children.
Meanwhile, as the years passed and no alternative suspects emerged, Mr Mahmood's family despaired of ever seeing justice.
It was not until 2006 that there was another break in the case, when an anonymous letter was handed in to Kirkwall police station, claiming to have been in the town's public toilets just before the shooting and had seen Ross there wielding a handgun.
The man who handed it in was soon identified as a local named William Grant.
It was enough to prompt a cold case review of the murder and a year later, Michael Ross was finally arrested.
Far from the innocent victim claimed by his defence, prosecutors portrayed Ross as a racist teenager obsessed with guns who had murdered Mr Mahmood in cold blood and then fled the scene.
There was to be a final twist. When Ross was found guilty at the High Court in Glasgow in June 2008, he leapt from the dock and made an attempt at escape before he was jumped on by a court official.
Some weeks later, an abandoned Avis hire car was found in the car park of a Tesco store in Springburn, around a mile from the court. Inside were a tent, sleeping bag, grenades, 450 rounds of ammunition, and a Skorpion machine pistol loaded and ready to fire.
Although he later claimed the gun was so he could 'head for the hills' and live rough, surviving on fish and game he killed, another five years were added on to his sentence.
Ross has since tried – and failed – to escape from prison three times, insisting he only does it to keep his name in the public eye. He has only succeeded in adding to his jail time – his earliest release date is currently 2035.
Last month, The Orcadian newspaper published a letter Ross wrote from prison in which he admits using racist language in his teens. 'I can see why they say I'm racist,' he wrote. 'As an immature teenage boy I did say horrible and offensive, racist things... I am truly embarrassed.'
Nevertheless, the campaign to clear his name continues and crowdfunding has paid for a high-profile human rights lawyer, Aamer Anwar, to fight his corner.
Mr Anwar said he believes people on the island know more than they let on and urged anyone with information to come forward. 'It may be that one shred of evidence might be enough. You just never know,' he said.
That cuts little ice with Brian McConnachie, KC, who prosecuted the case. 'There was a significantly persuasive body of evidence that pointed to it being Michael Ross,' he says, 'but in some ways one of the saddest features about this case is that [it] became all about Michael Ross and had very little to do with Shamsuddin Mahmood.'
Other victims continue to suffer in silence, too.
For Emma, long years of therapy and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder have helped her cope, but memories of that night still haunt her.
'I don't think you do move on from trauma, you just live around it,' she says. 'It's affected every decision I have ever made, I think, in my life in one way or another.'