Murder trial defendants Farhad Mahmud, Danai Muhammadi and Emma Smith

by Dan Bloom

Barristers will urge a jury today to find three triple murder suspects innocent.

Jurors are almost ready to begin deliberating after six weeks of evidence in the Chatham Hill murder trial.

Car salesman Danai Muhammadi, 24, and his friend Farhad Mahmud, 35, are accused of torching Muhammadi’s wife Melissa Crook’s house in Chatham Hill last September 10 after the marriage broke down.

It is said the pair used a garden weedkiller sprayer to fill the terraced home with petrol fumes.

Both men deny murdering Melissa, 20, her 15-month-old son Noah and father Mark, 49, and attempting to murder her brother Bohdan, 22, and mother Amanda, 50.

Mark Crook (left), his daughter Melissa and her toddler son Noah were killed in a house fire

Also denying murder is Muhammadi’s new girlfriend Emma Smith, who was in Maidstone when the fire happened. Prosecutors claim she “goaded” him into setting the blaze.

But Mahmud and Smith’s lawyers are warning the jury the evidence is not convincing enough to find them guilty.

Madmud’s barrister Ian Glen QC’s closing speech lasted less than an hour this morning. He said his client “was in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

Muhammadi’s barrister praised Melissa Crook’s family for their “great dignity” in his three-hour closing speech - but said there were “niggling worms of doubt”.

Amanda and Bohdan Crook escaped the fire

Timothy Barnes QC urged the jury on Friday to find the car salesman innocent.

He laid out 10 “crucial” areas where the prosecution case “didn’t add up”, including inconsistencies in witness accounts, and said it was “incomprehensible” the man would murder his own son.

He said the Crook family, especially mother Amanda, had suffered unimaginably but "the facts were the facts".

“Mrs Crook has behaved with great dignity throughout this trial,” he told the jury: “Her evidence was fair and balanced, and her attendance on every day as you have seen is understandable. But there is, ladies and gentlemen, a danger.

“A family has been destroyed and feelings of common humanity would lead you to want to convict a defendant, to give the family closure.”

He added: “You have a grave responsibility in this case and all I can say to you is there are real doubts.”

He said Muhammadi saw his wife and son just three days before she died and it was “a happy time”.

“Not only did he have no motive to want her dead, he had every reason to keep her alive,” he said.

Muhammadi behaved “disgracefully” when he punched his wife before the break-up, Mr Barnes said, but his actions were not those of a murderer.

“Any suggestion that Mr Muhammadi was a volcano of hatred and anger just waiting to explode flies directly in the face of the evidence,” he said.

“Why should he set out to murder members of a family who had shown him nothing by kindness?”

He said many of the prosecutors’ assumptions did not stack up - including that Emma Smith “goaded” her new boyfriend into murder.

“A less likely Lady Macbeth than Emma Smith it would be difficult to imagine,” he said. “[Muhammadi] was the dominant, infinitely the more intelligent of the two.”

"any suggestion that mr muhammadi was a volcano of hatred and anger just waiting to explode flies directly in the face of the evidence…” – timothy barnes

And she dialled 999, he added: “What murderer bent on killing his victims would call the emergency services at a time when they are still alive and might be saved?”

Kurdish-born Muhammadi had been through a terrible ordeal himself, Mr Barnes said.

He added: “He was in a foreign place, accused of the most horrendous crime, without access to anyone of his own family.”

Smith, of Barley Lea, Coventry, Muhammadi, of Britannia Street, Coventry, and Mahmud, of Fernhill Road, Maidstone, deny murder and attempted murder.

High Court judge Mr Justice Sweeney will begin summing up tomorrow at Maidstone Crown Court.

The jury of five men and seven women is due to retire on Wednesday to consider its verdict. The trial continues.