Why did the Met Police shred a 'lorry load of documents'?

It has emerged that documents relating to a corruption enquiry in the Met Police were shredded over two days.

17:13 18 March 2014

Mark Ellison, the barrister who reviewed the Stephen Lawrence investigation, revealed that a ‘lorry load of documents’ relating to a corruption enquiry in the Met Police was shredded over two days.

Stephen Lawrence was a teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in Eltham south-east London in 1993.

Ellison, during his review of the files, discovered evidence suggesting a detective had acted corruptly. He also found evidence from the subsequent Macpherson inquiry that were withheld from the police who were handling the case.

The Ellison report, which was published early this month, said that getting the files is important in order to establish links between the Lawrence case and to prove that there was police corruption at the time of the Macpherson inquiry in 1998.

In a statement, Scotland Yard confirmed that the documents were shredded. It reads: "The Met team who were gathering the material for Mr Ellison's work found a computer hard drive.”

"As the officers were working to recover the content of that hard drive they were told that a number of documents were shredded over a two-day period in 2003."

The Met added: "There is ongoing work to find out exactly what happened."