Coroner accused of 'offensive' remarks at inquest

A coroner was accused of insensitivity yesterday after he urged a black community to "pay back and conform with our beliefs" to help find the gunmen who killed two teenage girls at a New Year party in Birmingham.

Aidan Cotter was speaking at the opening of an inquest into the death of one of two victims. Charlene Ellis, 18, and her cousin, Letisha Shakespeare, 17, are thought to have been killed by members of feuding drugs gangs and witnesses appear to have been reluctant to talk to the police.

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, criticised Mr Cotter's use of the phrase "pay back". "I don't think anyone needs to talk about 'pay back' because we are part, they are part, of a cohesive community ... We are citizens of the same country," he told the BBC.

Mr Cotter had said: "Birmingham prides itself on being a multiracial city and the authorities go to great lengths to accommodate all the different cultures. Now is the time for your community to pay back that work and conform to our beliefs, which is that everybody has a duty to co-operate with the police and to make sure these murderers are caught and not given any protection by their friends and family."

Khalid Mahmood, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said the comments could offend the black community. "These comments are very unfortunate and insensitive," he said. "Mr Cotter needs to consider his remarks more wisely in future. The black community is doing all it can to assist the police – as they have acknowledged," he said.

Criticism was also voiced by Gleen Reid, whose son, Corey Allen, 28, is believed to have been shot dead by an armed gang in a nightclub two years ago. Mrs Reid, 50, who lives in Lozells, near Aston, is a member of the pressure group Mothers Against Guns. "There are many mothers like me whose sons have been killed - what do they have to pay back?" she said.

Mr Cotter apologised later to Charlene Ellis's mother, Beverley Thomas, and her family. "The word I used, which I recall was pay back, was unrehearsed," he said. "Pay back is a bad phrase which I regret using. I believe in a multiracial society. What I think is wrong is that people in the community, black or white, do not see it as their duty to co-operate with the police. It is these people that I am speaking about ... I was not criticising the black community," he said.