Mr Sukul said that to refer to the sorting out of postal votes in a warehouse at midnight as suspicious would be to use the most understated of adjectives in the English language.
Six men decided to take 275 postal votes from the secure Labour Party campaign headquarters at Aston to a deserted warehouse at midnight when they could and should have taken them straight to the council elections office.
They had been in possession of the postal votes since 3pm, yet they still had not handed them over at 4am the next day.
Mr Sukul said Coun Islam, the chairman of a housing association, was in a perfect position to obtain postal votes from residents.
Asked by the judge what he thought the men were doing at the warehouse, Mr Sukul replied: ?They were marking the votes.
?They were marking blank postal ballots and at the same time forging declarations of identity.
?The evidence is more than conclusive. There were 12 hands present that night. They were indeed forging those documents.
?There cannot be any other reasonable explanation for them being there.
?They were up to no good. There is no other explanation.
?The whole propriety of the local government elections, with costs amounting to thousands of pounds, has been put into jeopardy because of the conduct of the six men who sit in this court.?
Coun Kazi, he said, was ?tainted with every hue and every colour? with illegal activity by being caught in the warehouse.
Coun Afzal, he said, could have proved his innocence by applying for technical data relating to mobile phone calls he made on the night of the warehouse incident.
But Coun Afzal had chosen not to bring such evidence forward.
