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 home in Birmingham by an organised crime group who believed he was responsible for the loss of £1m worth of illicit cigarettes. He was driven to the Liverpool area and brutally attacked.

Tobiasz Kozlowski, of Kirby, Merseyside, and Neil Jones, 48, of no fixed address were found guilty of murder following the death of the 45-year-old who was kidnapped, falsely imprisoned, tortured and set on fire.

Two more men, Kevin Wooden, of Banbury, Oxfordshire, and Kye Arthur, from Bristol, were cleared of murder but found guilty of manslaughter.

All four men will be sentenced on 9 October.

Samel, also a member of an organised crime group, was kidnapped from his Handsworth home by Wooden and Arthur and a third male. They had posed as Interpol officers executing a European arrest warrant.

He died from his injuries in hospital about three months later.

Opening the case earlier prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu KC told the court after he was kidnapped, Samel was "falsely imprisoned, he was placed in a white Peugeot Boxer van and he was driven to Merseyside."

It is there where he was tortured and he 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.

He was taken to Whiston Hospital in Prescot but died on June 21 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."

Jones and Kozlowski were said to have been present when Samel was tortured and set on fire, while Wooden and Arthur were "recruited" to become part of the planning.

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 recruited others to help kidnap, imprison and inflict serious violence on him as punishment.

Kate Seal, from the Crown Prosecution Service said Samel was subjected to "horrendous violence" and what happened to him was 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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