Photo: RCMP

Afshin Ighani

While nobody besides police would testify against him at trial, prosecutors argued Thursday previous statements by alleged victims made to officers and at a preliminary inquiry should be enough to convict Afshin Ighani for a 2017 armed kidnapping.

During his closing statements in Penticton Supreme court, Crown counsel John Swanson attempted to temper the judge’s concerns about the testimony, or lack thereof, from the two alleged victims in the case. 

Christopher Gliege fled the country prior to the start of trial in Dec. 2018 — ostensibly to avoid testifying — leaving the Crown to rely on his statements from the preliminary inquiry. 

The other alleged victim, Jodie Walker, previously took the stand and steadfastly maintained she remembered nothing from the day of the incident, going as far as refusing to recognize herself in the video recording of a police interview she gave immediately after being rescued. 

“Obviously there was an opportunity for her to start to fear for her own safety,” Swanson said Thursday when asked by the judge to explain the discrepancy between Walker’s police statement and trial testimony. 

During that 2017 police statement, Walker told a Princeton RCMP officer she feared Ighani would come after if she cooperated with police. 

During his closing submissions, Swanson detailed the Crown’s case and pointed to large similarities between Walker’s police statement and Gliege’s pretrial testimony. 

On the day of the alleged kidnapping, April 22, 2017, the Crown says Walker and Gliege were driving Ighani to the Lower Mainland in exchange for $400. Ighani was the subject of a region-wide manhunt at the time in connection to a shooting in Oliver. 

Somewhere between Princeton and Manning Park, Ighani directed the pair to drive the vehicle up a forest service road and stop at the six kilometre mark, where he produced a handgun and threatened Gliege, telling him to dig. 

The Crown alleges Ighani would fire the gun off above Gliege’s head, before ordering Walker back into the car and leaving Gliege at the side of the dirt road. 

After Gliege called the RCMP, police tracked Walker’s cellphone to a trailer park in Princeton where officers found her behind the wheel and Ighani fleeing on foot.

Swanson Thursday highlighted the fact that Walker told police after being rescued that the revolver — which Gliege also described in detail during his pre-trial testimony — was stashed under the hood of the car where police would later find it.

Swanson argued the judge would have to find that the pair colluded if she was going to ignore the similarities between the two alleged victim’s statements.

Earlier in the day Thursday, a self-represented Ighani declined to call any witnesses or evidence in his defence, after nearly two hours of wrangling. 

He tried to argue he had not received full disclosure from the Crown since firing his lawyer back in May after the Crown closed its case. 

A visibly annoyed Justice Nitya Iyer ruled that Ighani had indeed been served with full disclosure, or anything that was missed, had no relevance to the case. Ighani was fixated on trying to get the helicopter pilot involved in the hunt for him to testify, something she repeatedly explained to him wouldn't happen 

“Let me be very clear, I have made my ruling. I am not going to discuss it further. I can see that you don’t agree with it, however, I have made the ruling and now we are moving on,” she said.

Iyer ended up granting Ighani one final adjournment to allow him to prepare for his closing submissions, which are scheduled for Jan. 6, 2020.

Ighani is also facing separate charges for allegedly stabbing two protective custody inmates at OCC in 2017 and allegedly assaulting a prison guard in 2018.

He was the subject of two deportation orders for criminal activity in 2002 and 2007 that were eventually overturned.