JERICHO murder ‘victim’ Alex Innes exchanged a series of fraught Snapchat messages with his alleged killer almost two weeks before his death.
The social media exchange with Greg ‘Gino’ Muinami was retrieved from 25-year-old Mr Innes’ phone following his alleged murder, jurors were told at Oxford Crown Court on Wednesday (May 17).
Sent on the evening of November 1, they concerned a ‘bill’ – slang for £100 – that Muinami, 19, was said to have owed Mr Innes. The debt followed the alleged sale of some trainers to the teenager, the court has previously heard.
Shortly before 8pm, the older man sent Muinami the Snapchat messages: “You owe me a bill, bro. You just fell off the map.”
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He added in what prosecutors have suggested was a reference to the shoes: “I niced you with them and you just ghosted man like a d***head.”
Muinami shot back at Mr Innes: “You love talking smoke on man’s name think I won’t hear it.”
The latter pressed again for an update on the whereabouts of his money, asking: “What’s good with my P [slang for money].”
“Wanna bite?” Muinami replied, sending a short video of himself apparently taking a bite out of a stack of cash notes-like paper.
Mr Innes told the younger man to ‘floss with someone else’s money’, earning the reply: “Okay den stay hungry.”
The exchange finished at 8.03pm, with Mr Innes telling Muinami: “See you soon kiddo.” Muinami replied with an emoji of a red heart.
The men did, in fact, see each other relatively soon after, the jury were told - seeing each other at a Cowley Road bar on November 6.
On Wednesday afternoon, Sayed Hashimi, the owner of the Clouds Shisha Lounge told jurors that Mr Innes was a regular customer.
On November 6, he had been at the bar with his cousin, a Chey Brown, when a group of young men came in asking for a table, Mr Hashimi told jurors. He was speaking from behind a curtain, shielding him from the dock and the public gallery.
He said of one of the men, said to have been Muinami: “He saw Alex and to be honest they exchanged a look and the next moment Alex and him went outside.”
Mr Hashimi said the two men were outside for around half an hour. They were talking ‘normal’, with no shouting.
Asked by prosecutor Jonathan Higgs KC if he heard what they were speaking about, he replied: "The only thing that comes into my head is something about shoes.”
For Muinami, David Hislop KC asked in a series of linked questions: "Neither man was aggressive with each other? No physical contact between them? No raised voices and I think you described it in this way to the police: 'pleasantries between them'?”
"They were talking normal," the witness said.
Another staff member at the bar, Efadil Aldaher, suggested Mr Innes had looked ‘stressed’ when he returned to his table.
A friend of Mr Innes’, Shohaib Ahmed, who was at the shisha bar on November 6, suggested that the pair were outside for around five minutes. When he returned, Alex had ‘carried on as usual’. He agreed with Mr Hislop’s suggestion that he would have noticed had his friend been ‘upset, angry, fuming’.
The trial continues.
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