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Pakistan cricketers Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif were found guilty on Tuesday of fixing parts of a Test against England in a case that has thrown the credibility of the international game into doubt.
Former Test captain Butt, 27, and fast bowler Asif, 28, face jail after a court in London convicted them of deliberately bowling three no-balls during the Lord’s Test in August 2010 as part of a “spot-fixing” betting scam.
The verdicts are a scalp from beyond the grave for Britain’s News of the World tabloid, which uncovered the conspiracy but was shut down earlier this year.
Prosecutors alleged Butt and Asif conspired with British agent Mazher Majeed and Pakistan fast bowler Mohammad Aamer to bowl the no-balls as part of a plot that revealed “rampant corruption” at the heart of international cricket.
The pair face up to seven years in jail after both were convicted of conspiracy to obtain or accept corrupt payments, and conspiracy to cheat at gambling.
They are expected to be sentenced later this week.
Butt and Asif had pleaded not guilty but it was revealed after the verdicts that 19-year-old Aamer had pleaded guilty before the trial of his team-mates.
Majeed has also been charged with the same offences but is not standing trial alongside Butt and Asif.
In a further twist, Butt’s wife gave birth to a baby boy just 30 minutes before the verdict was delivered, his father said by telephone from Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore. Butt already has one daughter.
“It’s a matter of great grief for us that Butt has been found guilty. We hope the Almighty will bring him out of this trouble because these are very difficult times for him and the family,” Zulfiqar Butt said.
During the three-week trial the jury heard that vast sums of money could be made by rigging games for betting syndicates, particularly in South Asia, and that the problem was threatening the game of cricket.
Mazher Mahmood told the court he had approached Majeed pretending to be an Indian businessman.
Majeed claimed he had at least six Pakistani players working for him and that it would cost between STG50,000 and STG80,000 ($A74,239 and $A118,973) to fix a “bracket”, where bets are made on incidents during a given period of play.
But the cost of rigging a whole result was far more, at STG400,000 ($A615,337) for a Twenty20, STG450,000 ($A692,254) for a one-day international, and STG1 million ($A1.54 million) for Test matches, Majeed allegedly told the reporter.
The agent was secretly filmed accepting STG150,000 ($A230,751) in cash from the journalist and recorded allegedly making arrangements with Butt for the no balls.
Butt told the court he had ignored his agent’s requests to fix games and had no knowledge of the plan to bowl no balls, while admitting that he had failed in his duty to inform cricketing authorities of Majeed’s approach.
Asif meanwhile said he had bowled a no ball at the exact time the agent had predicted to the News of the World journalist because Butt had told him to run faster moments before his delivery.
The case is the worst in international cricket since that of South Africa’s Hansie Cronje a decade ago.
Cronje was banned for life in 2000 after it was revealed he accepted money from bookmakers in a bid to influence the course of games as well as trying to corrupt his team-mates. He died in a plane crash in 2002.
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