Case collapses after drug found to be paracetamol.
A former boxing champion has been cleared of possessing cocaine after bungling cops in Malta mistook paracetamol for the Class A drug.
Scott Dixon, 38 who has acted as Hollywood giant Brad Pitt’s body double in the Guy Ritchie film Snatch was charged by police on the Mediterranean island in 2011 after a sachet of white powder was found on him during a search. However, this week, almost three years after he was arrested, the case against him collapsed.
Expert witness Godwin Scerri told the court that the white powder was not cocaine and had been identified as the over-the-counter painkiller. Dixon, originally from Hamilton, was then acquitted.
However, the ex-Commonwealth welterweight title holder still faces charges he was involved in a plot to import £1.3 million worth of cannabis into Malta.
In 2009 he was arrested on an international arrest warrant and extradited from the UK to Malta in connection with a 500kg cannabis haul. Five other suspects, including Serbian
Jovaica Kolakovic and Lithuanian Tomas Mikalauskas were charged. Dixon denies conspiracy to import and traffic cannabis. No court date has been fixed.
The dad-of-two had fled Scotland for Malta in 2006 after claiming criminals had put a £70,000 bounty on his head.
He said: “I’m a wanted man in Scotland. They still want me dead. I’ve moved here for my own safety and peace of mind. I don’t want to go back to that environment.
“I’d fear for my life if I went back. As soon as I step off a plane I could be shot or anything.”
Dixon’s 41-fight pro boxing career came to a halt after he was abducted outside his home in Hamilton. Ex-Scottish schoolboy boxing champion Garry McMillan and two accomplices battered him with a baseball bat and stabbed him with a sword. He suffered broken legs, arms and multiple rib fractures. He was stabbed through the hands and feet and needed 35 staples in his head.
McMillan, 26, from Bellshill, Lanarkshire, was jailed for five years at the High Court in Glasgow in 2004.
Dixon said: “They dragged me into the car and took me to the countryside where they beat me up. They stabbed me so many times and broke many bones in my body.
“I was shot twice in the leg and left for dead.
“I crawled to the main road and then to a farmhouse. At the hospital I suffered a seizure in the operating theatre.
“At first I thought I would never walk again because everything was so severely smashed up but I got through it.”
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