A posh estate’s former residents’ association boss has cleared her name after being wrongly convicted of mowing down a builder with her car.
Coombe Roads Association’s ex-chairman Shaukia Mir, 50, had her conviction quashed last month of attacking builder Geoffrey Fallows while he was building a fence between her house and the next door property in Henley Road, a private enclave in Coombe Hill, New Malden.
Mr Fallows, who works for Wimbledon-based property developer John Desmond, told Kingston Magistrates in March 2010 that his leg was hit by Mir’s green/blue Audi after she drove at the fence at high-speed.
But last month, a judge at Kingston Crown Court overturned Mrs Mir’s conviction, saying there were problems with evidence used to eventually convict her in July 2010.
Mrs Mir said: “I feel as though I have been to prison and back. I consider myself to be very honest and decent, but to be accused of that was the worst experience of my life.
“It just shows how naïve I was because I trusted the justice system to get it right in the first place.”
During the trial, Mr Fallows showed the court photographs from the incident on October 29, 2009, which appeared to show Mrs Mir’s car had suffered damage to its front bumper as a result of the assault.
The builder told the court: “I heard the car start and heard it coming towards me. I did not have time to get away and she only stopped when she hit the fence and struck me on the left leg.
“She then got out of the car and I said to her ‘What do you think you are doing? You can’t just run down somebody’. She didn’t seem like she was bothered.”
Mrs Mir’s defence solicitor accused Mr Fallows of fabricating evidence in order to “get Mrs Mir in trouble” because she and his boss, Mr Desmond, were involved in a long-running dispute over where he was allowed to build.
He said: “You were aware that there was a long running boundary dispute, and your response was to carry on building, even after Mrs Mir told you not to.”
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