when a police officer found the iPad with a metal detector a cold morning of November 2024, he was covered with mud after having remained underwater for more than five years.
The forensic managed to clean it and read the SIM card. The call data that were recovered provided forceful evidence against three men: Louis Ahearne, Stewart Ahearne and Daniel Kelly.
“I have asked me a lot,” reflected the Superintendent Matt Webb detective of the Metropolitan Police, who led the investigation. “Did they make catastrophic mistakes or simply said we would catch them?”
“Meticulously planned”
The first time the brothers Ahearne and Kelly caught the attention of the police was on July 11, 2019, after shooting that broke the silence an afternoon in the wealthy Woodford area, England.
Six bullets crossed the crystal of a greenhouse in a luxurious property of comedian Russell Kane, who had been rented to former Luluador Paul Allen.
One bullet cut a finger to Allen, the other pierced his throat and lodged in the spinal cord, leaving him with difficulty breathing and bleeding profusely.
“They shot him, they shot him!” Allen’s couple shouted, Jade Bovington.
While frantically called an ambulance, the neighbors and a private security guard heard the screams and ran to give him first aid.
A witness described having seen a man jump a wall, run between bushes and getting directly to a vehicle that expected him, which fled immediately.
Today, Allen remains confined in a wheelchair, with arms and leg paralysis.
Allen became famous as one of the leaders of what remains the greatest armed robbery in the history of the United Kingdom.
In 2006, he was part of a band that used balaclavas and carried weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle, and threatened to kill the staff of the Securitas Deposit in Tonbridge, Kent.
They stole 53 million pounds (US $ 68 million) in banknotes from the Bank of England, leaving behind 199 million pounds that did not cup in their truck.
Allen fled to Morocco four days later, but was arrested in Rabat along with his friend and assault partner, Lee Murray, who remains in prison in the nearby city of Tiflet.
In January 2008, Allen was extradited to the United Kingdom and subsequently sentenced to 18 years in prison.
He was released in 2016 and returned to his place of origin in southeastern London. But he moved to Woodford with his partner and his two minor children after an armed man opened fire against him and his pregnant daughter at the door of his house in Woolwich, London, in September 2018.
Ten months later, Allen almost dies when those two bullets reached him while he was in the kitchen of his house in Woodford.
The Prosecutor’s Office argued that the brothers Ahearne and Kelly were equally guilty of the plot to kill Allen, who involved a rental car, surveillance and prepaid telephone numbers.
“This was an attempt to kill meticulously investigated and planned by a team of men with extensive knowledge of the level of crime necessary to carry it out,” said prosecutor Michael Shaw.
Upon discovering how the three knew where to find Allen, the police also discovered that their criminal activity was much greater.
Geneva and London
Just a month before the shooting, the brothers Ahearne and Kelly were in front of the Museum of Art of the East in Geneva, equipped with a deck, angular tweezers and levers.
Seconds after forcing the main door, the crystals that housed antiques of the Ming dynasty of the China of the fourteenth century broke.
Three objects were taken: a rare vase from Granada, a Cup of Doucai style wine and a porcelain bowl, whose total insured value was US $ 3.6 million.
In his hurry to flee, Stewart cut himself with the walls of the hole that the band made at the main door, leaving traces of their DNA.
He had rented at the Geneva airport the vehicle in which they fled.
Louis, on the other hand, was recorded by the security cameras inside and outside the museum the day before the assault.
A few days after returning to southeast London with stolen objects, the trio prepared to get rid of the articles they had stolen.
The brothers flew to Hong Kong with Kelly while trying to sell one of the stolen objects in an auction house.
The auction house alerted the London Police, who sent undercover agents posing as art merchants.
during the trial, the British Prosecutor’s Office argued that international theft showed that the Ahearne and Kelly were at the top of crime.
But the police did not know that, while looking for stolen antiques, the three would leave almost similar clues that would betray their presence in Woodford’s shooting.
The rental car and the purchase of a soda
In the hours after the shooting, the crime scene was examined in Woodford. Six gusting caps shot by a Glock semi -automatic pistol were found, as well as wear marks in the rear garden fence of the property, from the direction in which the shootings were made.
It was discovered that DNA samples taken from the fence probably belonged to Louis and Kelly.
When reviewing the images of the security cameras, the police were able to identify the registration of a silver gray renaultcur, owned by the Avis Company.
The records showed that Stewart had rented it at a Dartford branch two days before the shooting and had returned it the next day.
Subsequent inspections of security cameras revealed that 90 minutes before the shooting, the Renault had entered a Shell workshop in Hill Road Shooters, near Greenwich, in London.
“They stopped in a gas station because Louis Ahearne was thirsty,” Shaw said before the court.
“The problem with gas stations is that they have very good security cameras,” Shaw added.
Two days before, Kelly and Louis had been driven by Stewart in the same Renault Captur a Ide Hill Hall, a 16th -century mansion converted into luxury apartments in Sevenoaks, Kent.
Making pass by police, with an intermittent blue light on the Renault roof, the trio and another man broke into closed property and stole design articles.
Subsequently, they were convicted by the Maidstone court for theft and attempted robbery in another apartment.
The next day, on July 10, Stewart used the Renault to drive through eastern London areas, such as Bethnal Green, Snaresbrook and Woodford.
A more detailed analysis of the traffic cameras showed that the Renault followed a silver mercedes belonging to the Allen.
But the detectives would have to wait more than five years to discover how men found Allen’s whereabouts.
Discovering the truth in Thames
In October 2024, four months before the start of the trial in the criminal court and shortly after being extradited from Switzerland to the United Kingdom, Louis presented his defense, which contained an intriguing detail.
He declared that while he returned to Woolwich, the Renault had stopped at John Harrison Way, a street next to the Thames river.
Louis said he hoped that the images of the street security cameras would be recovered, which would show him “drinking fresh air” while Kelly disappeared in the direction of Thames.
The Webb inspector said: “We knew that the vehicle had stopped at John Harrison Way and that Kelly came out, but nothing more. We didn’t know where it was, we didn’t know what had happened.”
“Immediately, we thought that if someone wanted to get rid of something crucial, it would probably be a firearm,” he added.
Archand the puzzle
Louis’s defense caught attention to the stop that led to the discovery of the iPad in the Thames river, which enraged Kelly, who learned just before the trial began.
The second day of the trial, a recording from a prison van captured Kelly by shouting Louis: “How is you treating you soplon?”
Kelly and Stewart remained silent on the bench throughout the trial and refused to declare, after expressing fears for their safety. Louis hinted at the jury who was Kelly who clenched the trigger in Woodford’s shooting.
But the Webb Chief Inspector said the iPad was the key to unraveling everything.
“We are all stunned and dumbfounded,” he said. “Detective Matthew Freeman called me and told me that they had gone to Thames and found an iPad.”
“I can’t repeat what I said, but I was speechless. What a beautiful piece of the puzzle to assemble!”
The call data showed that both the iPad and an iPhone 6, owned by Kelly, had contacted some selected numbers, including the Ahearne brothers.
The SIM card was also linked to GPS tracking devices that were found inside a car when Louis and Kelly were arrested in August 2019.
Email accounts were subsequently linked to Kelly and a nearby collaborator.
From there, the police could examine 59 purchases at Amazon and Ebay. Some included unregistered nokia phones used to communicate during the murder plot.
The SIM card was in use until it disappeared from the network shortly before they triggered Allen.
The three men, who proved to be experienced international criminals, were discovered by tenacious detectives who found their disposable technological device.
They were declared guilty of conspiracy to kill and sentenced at the end of April to a total of more than a century in prison.
“This attack may seem the plot of a Hollywood movie, but the reality is something quite different,” Webb said after the verdict. “This was a horrific crime.”
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FUENTE: BBC
