Tycoon killer sure of release from prison

Published on Thursday 24 October 2002 01:00

NICHOLAS van Hoogstraten, the convicted killer, firmly believes he will walk free from jail tomorrow when he is sentenced at the Old Bailey for the manslaughter of a former business partner.

Van Hoogstraten, a London property tycoon, who was found guilty in July of hiring two hit-men to kill Mohammed Raja, 62, a businessman and father of six, has made the claims in a number of letters from his high-security cell in Belmarsh prison.

The flamboyant millionaire was found guilty of manslaughter after Robert Knapp, 54, of Co Limerick, and David Croke, 60, of Moulsecoomb, Brighton, were convicted of murdering Mr Raja who was stabbed and shot at his home in Sutton, Surrey.

During the case, a jury ruled that although van Hoogstraten had not ordered the killing of Mr Raja, he had sent Knapp and Croke to scare him.

It emerged yesterday that in a series of letters to his local newspaper in Brighton, van Hoogstraten claims the judge will either order a retrial, granting bail at the same time, or quash the conviction. In the correspondence, the tycoon says doubt has already been cast over the jury’s verdict earlier this year.

He claims: "No-one who sat through the trial ... could possibly have concluded I was guilty of anything." Of his conviction, van Hoogstraten writes: "The suggestion that I, with my resources, would send a pair of over-the-hill heroin addicts, one of whom could be traced to me, to kill or as it later became, frighten, Mr Raja using a 400 beaten up getaway van and singlebarrelled shotgun is a farce, and such a farce that I never took the allegations seriously."

In the letters to the Brighton Argus newspaper, van Hoogstraten also writes that the food at Belmarsh jail, in south-east London, was acceptable and the prison officers "decent", and that he firmly disagrees with the bleak picture of the high-security prison painted by Lord Archer in his new book, A Prison Diary.

Archer spent the first weeks of his sentence for perjury at Belmarsh. Van Hoogstraten, whose palatial mansion at Uckfield, East Sussex, remains unfinished, writes: "Nothing much of what Archer has to say is true," adding: "There is nothing wrong with the food. The officers and staff are 95 per cent decent people trying to do a difficult job with inadequate managerial back-up and resources."

The 57-year-old, who owns a number of properties in Brighton and Hove, has been placed in a high-risk section of the jail for 12 inmates.

In his letters he writes: "My life here is fine under the circumstances. I am regarded as a high security risk so I am in a special section. "