About This Episode
What is this episode about?
The episode "The Unlawful Killing of Yousef Makki" from REAL covers the death of 17-year-old Yousef Makki, a privately educated teenager who was out with two friends on the 2nd of March 2019 when a single moment ended his life. Makki was described as a budding heart surgeon whose future was cut short in circumstances that would later divide legal opinion.
The episode centers on the stark contradiction that followed his death: a criminal court concluded he was killed in self-defence, while an inquest reached the opposite verdict, ruling that he had been unlawfully killed. This clash between the two legal processes forms the core of The Unlawful Killing, as the episode explores how the same set of facts produced two entirely different official conclusions about what happened that night.
Hosts and release
Naomi Channell created the show, and REAL is described as an independent true crime podcast built around audio documentaries that dig into real-life criminal cases. The episode runs 29 minutes and is available on Spotify. As an independent production, REAL focuses on the kind of detailed, single-case storytelling that allows a complex legal contradiction like the one in Makki's case to be unpacked within a short runtime, giving listeners both the criminal court's reasoning and the inquest's differing verdict.
