The teenage Orkney killer who got away with murder for 14 years

It was a beautiful summer evening in Orkney, when a loud gunshot rang out and the peaceful corner of the world changed forever. 

Families were dining in the only Indian Restaurant in the main town of Kirkwall, when a masked man calmly walked in on June 2 1994 and shot 26-year-old waiter Shamsuddin Mahmood at point-blank range, before vanishing into the night.

It was the first murder to happen in 25 years on the island located just off the northern coast of Scotland, which has a population of around 22,000.

Detectives arrived overnight, the area was sealed off, and the big question of who could have killed Shamsuddin was at the forefront of the locals’ minds. He had no known enemies and had only arrived in Orkney six weeks before, with plans to soon return to Bangladesh to marry his fiancée. 

An investigation commenced, and 2,736 statements were taken. A pair of witnesses claimed they saw teenager Michael Ross wearing the same balaclava and dark clothing as the murderer in woodland a fortnight earlier. The 15-year-old was called in for questioning, accompanied by his police officer father, Edmund Ross. Michael proclaimed his innocence and provided an alibi – he’d seen friends on the evening of the murder, however, they later denied being in his company.

In the Amazon Prime Video documentary The Orkney Assassin: Murder in the Isles, his mother, Moira, recalls asking Michael if he had killed Shamsuddin.

‘I remember him coming home with the detective, and he went up to his room and sat there,’ she says tearfully. ‘I did go up and ask him “Did you shoot that man?” And he said: “No”. I just can’t get over the look on his face when I asked him that.’

Edmund adds, ‘My head was spinning at the time. I didn’t believe it. I knew my son, and he never showed any sort of tendency to go out and shoot anyone.’

Evidence continued to build when Michael admitted dropping his balaclava into the sea with a heavy stone attached, and a bedroom search found school books marked with swastikas, ‘Death to the English’ scribbles and SS symbols.

Meanwhile, Edmund owned the same type of bullets that were used in the murder, but didn’t reveal this information until two months after the inquiry had begun. When lead investigator Angus Chisholm asked where they’d come from, he initially claimed he couldn’t remember, before later revealing they came from a friend and former Marine, Jim Spence.

The findings did not lead to a conviction; however, in 1997, Edmund was imprisoned for four years on charges of lying to the police and tampering with a witness, after it was alleged that he asked Jim to lie.

Despite the determination of some detectives, the troubling case began to slip into obscurity. That was until 12 years after the murder in 2006, when a mysterious letter was delivered to the local police station. A new witness, later identified as William Grant, wrote that he had seen the killer in public toilets on the night of the murder, brandishing a gun. He identified him as Michael.

Advocate depute Brian McConnachie QC, who led the prosecution case, tells Metro: ‘When the incident happened, long before I was ever involved, it was taken to the Crown Office, and a decision was made that there was insufficient evidence against Michael. However, the letter was enough to reopen, and that’s when I looked over the case; I didn’t necessarily agree with the original decision that evidence wasn’t strong enough to proceed with the case.’

The revelation led to the shock arrest of Michael, who in the intervening years had married, become a father of two and now worked as a sergeant of a sniper platoon in Scotland’s Black Watch regiment. 

As so much time had passed, it was a ‘challenging’ case for Brian to take on, he says. ‘In cold cases, people who gave statements have forgotten what they said, what they saw, and they may have heard somebody else say something, and that becomes part of their memory.’ 

He adds: ‘There wasn’t the same amount of CCTV in 1994 as there is now, and people didn’t carry mobile telephones. Nowadays, the police solve a lot of crimes because the accused can be pinpointed to be in a particular location through signal.’

However, the authorities had enough to bring it the case trial in 2008, where the ‘compelling, unanswerable’ circumstantial evidence was presented.

‘It could be described as putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It was trying to find all the different pieces to make the picture. The bullets, his access, and interest in firearms were all important, then we added Mr Grant’s identification into it,’ says Brian.

Although a motive isn’t needed to prove someone’s guilt, it was suggested that Michael’s racist views had led him to shoot one of Orkney’s only Asian residents. A fellow cadet claimed Michael said: ‘Blacks should be shot’.

‘It was such a pointless and senseless killing,’ says Brian. ‘There wasn’t a feud between them, but there was certainly an amount of evidence which suggested that at the relevant time, he had racist tendencies.

‘Whether that was something that was genuinely felt or it was just the rantings of a teenager, it’s hard to say. I’ve said in the past that I’ve never been totally convinced about the racism angle.’

During the trial, Michael’s lawyer, Donald Findlay, argued it was unthinkable that a teenager would have carried out the killing, claiming it was more likely to be a ‘professional hit’. But at the end of a six-week trial, it took jurors just four hours to reach a guilty verdict of murder.

At the trial, Shamsuddin’s brother, barrister Abul Shafiuddin, said: ‘He was our baby brother and at least we know the person who killed him will be punished.’

Upon hearing his fate, Michael attempted to escape by jumping out of the dock at Glasgow High Court, assaulting a guard and making it into an outside corridor, before being wrestled to the ground.

Days before, he had parked a hired car two miles from the court with a machine gun, hand grenades and a sleeping bag amongst the items found in the boot. He explained in an open letter to supporters that he would have used the items to live off the land. It hasn’t been his only attempt to escape punishment either, as he has since tried to leave prison three times.

Brian says: ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen anything like that from somebody who’d just been convicted of murder.

‘If someone thinks they’re innocent and is convicted, they might well want to escape, but the fact that he was running to a motor vehicle filled with the items, is a problem. The jury decided his guilt without all of that evidence, but I don’t think that helps his position now.’ 

Even so, the case of Shamsuddin’s murder is far from over, with a shadow of doubt still dividing opinion in Orkney to this day.

Michael’s family believe there has been a grave miscarriage of justice, while a petition has been set up by supporters to clear his name, which currently has 2650 signatures. Michael, now 46, remains incarcerated, and his earliest release date is 2035.

Orkney local Ethan Flett wasn’t even born when the crime took place, but the 25-year-old has spent many hours analysing the case through his role as a reporter for the island newspaper The Orcadian. 

The journalism took him to Perth prison, where he went through airport-like security, before sitting down at a table that had been screwed into the floor. When Michael entered the visitors’ room, Ethan didn’t instantly recognise him. ‘He’s been taking the gym seriously,’ the young reporter thought to himself.

As they began chatting, Ethan quickly made it clear that he wasn’t interested in campaigning for his innocence or trying to find anybody else guilty. Even so, Michael was happy to give his first ever interview.

‘The meeting will stick in my mind for a while. He seemed very laid-back and was an easy guy to deal with. It is one of the paradoxes, considering what he’s been convicted of, but he seemed at least like a fairly normal person. It’s strange,’ recalls Ethan to Metro. They spent the next six months writing back and forth to each other, with Michael responding to each of Ethan’s questions in great detail.

‘What I found most interesting was his justifications for his escape attempts. He says that he did it to garner a bit of publicity for his claims of innocence, and says that he would have surrendered to the authorities if he were successful,’ Ethan explains.

‘He admitted to saying racist things as a teenager, but claimed that it was immaturity that he regretted.’

Ethan adds that the police previously publicly stated that they had ruled out racism as the motive, which ‘would make it a motiveless crime, so it’s hard to get your head around.’

In letters to Ethan, Michael says that the reason the friends mentioned in his alibi don’t remember talking to him is that the police didn’t question them until months had passed.

Ethan’s research has also raised some possible inconsistencies, such as when Michael became a suspect. He was questioned about his movements on the night of the murder on December 2 1994. Michael’s legal team have said that the audio shouldn’t have been allowed in court, as he hadn’t been offered a lawyer. The appeal was rejected as it was determined he wasn’t a suspect at this point.

‘I found court records from the trial of Eddy, which stated that Michael had become the prime and only suspect as of September,’ says Ethan. ‘There are unsolved leads in the case, such as two days before the murder, there was a heated argument at the door of the restaurant between Shamsuddin and people trying to get in. According to one of the witnesses inside the restaurant, the man threatened to shoot Shamsuddin a number of times. 

‘A month into the investigation, one of the detectives was quoted as saying that the incident had been cleared up. However, a statement was taken from the detective who led the cold case review when Michael’s conviction was examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2014, and he said it wasn’t solved.’

As a journalist, Ethan remains impartial. 

‘I don’t know whether or not he committed the murder. My interest has always been in the handling of the investigation by the police. There’s still so much interest in this case from Orkney people, so the story is ongoing,’ he explains.

Meanwhile, Brian doesn’t think there’s enough to appeal the case’s verdict: ‘I think new evidence becoming available is the only way that it would get back into the court.

‘I haven’t seen or heard anything yet to make me think that the jury got it wrong.’

The Orkney Assassin: Murder in the Isles will be available on Prime Video in the UK & Ireland on June 8

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