27 years for woman in sunshine isle murder plot

AN ENGLISH divorcee was jailed for 27 years today for the murder of her lover and business partner in the Canary Islands nearly three years ago.

The two British hitmen Jackie Ambler hired to carry out the killing in the bar she ran with the victim in Tenerife were each sentenced to 29 years' imprisonment. The heavy sentences - just short of the maximum under Spanish law of 30 years - were the most severe sentences ever on Britons in post-Franco Spain.

Three judges at the Palace of Justice in Santa Cruz, Tenerife's capital, ruled that Ambler, 33, the daughter of a former mine supervisor from Rossington, near Doncaster, was behind the killing of Michael O'Hara, 39, from Wakefield. He was beaten over the head with a metal beer barrel, then choked with a cloth rammed down his throat at Stevie's Bar, the couple's British-style pub at the Los Cris- tianos resort, on 5 September 1995. Ambler denied plotting the killing with Gary Holmes, 31, from Littlehampton, and Stanley Stewart, also 31, from Stirlingshire, or promising them GBP 54,000 hit money. But the pair, who were working as bouncers at the resort, made statements describing how they planned the murder with her in a neighbouring bar. Holmes later claimed he alone killed O'Hara in a fight over a drugs debt, but judges rejected this account.

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