The seemingly unconnected theft of a Ming vase from a Swiss museum and a shooting at a comedian’s house were part of a web of international organised crime that police solved after finding an old iPad
The attempted assassination of a former cage fighter who was convicted of Britain’s largest cash robbery was solved by detectives thanks a dirty iPad that washed up from a river.
Career criminal Paul Allen, 47, was paralysed from the chest down after shots were fired at his home in Woodford Green, northeast London, in 2019, which he rented from comedian Russell Kane.
Of the six bullets fired at the house, two tore through a glass conservatory at the luxury property. One severed one of Allen’s fingers and another went through his throat and became lodged in his spinal cord, leaving him struggling to breathe and bleeding profusely.
Allen was one of the ringleaders of Britain’s biggest ever armed robbery in 2006, as part of a balaclava-wearing, gun-toting gang which threatened to kill staff at the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent.
They stole £53m in Bank of England cash notes and left behind £154m which would not fit into their lorry. Allen was extradited to the UK and jailed for 18 years after being arrested while on the run in Morocco.
His attempted murder came three years after his release from prison after he relocated to Woodford with his partner and two younger children.
His would-be killers, brothers Louis and Stewart Ahearne and their accomplice Daniel Kelly, were this week found guilty of guilty of conspiracy to murder after a seven week trial at the Old Bailey.
The court was told the defendants had carried out surveillance and fitted a tracker device to Allen’s car. They then travelled from Woolwich, southeast London, and snuck into a garden overlooking their victim’s back garden before opening fire.
The three men had snatched Ming dynasty antiques worth over £2.7 million from a museum in Geneva a month before Allen was shot.
Stewart Ahearne and another man were arrested at a London hotel in 2020 as they tried to sell a Ming vase to an undercover officer.
During a six-year investigation, detectives in the UK worked with cops in Switzerland to try to piece together the puzzle of how exactly they were all connected to the shooting.
Then last October, four months before the Old Bailey trial started and not long after being extradited from Switzerland back to the UK, Louis Ahearne issued his defence statement which contained one intriguing detail.
He claimed that, while heading back to Woolwich, their hire care had stopped at John Harrison Way and he hoped CCTV from the street which would show him “getting some air” while Kelly disappeared in the direction of the Thames.
At first, detectives thought Kelly may have tried to discarded the gun, but a police officers with a metal detector found an iPad under an inch of sand on the foreshore of the River Thames just downstream from the O2 Arena.
Thought the iPad was found caked in mud having been underwater for more than five years, that discovery on a cold November morning last year became the key piece of evidence.
Forensics were able to clean it and open the Sim tray, which still contained a pink Vodafone Sim card.
Call data that was subsequently salvaged showed the iPad and an iPhone 6 belonging to Kelly had contacted a select few numbers, including the Ahearne brothers.
The Sim card was also linked to GPS tracking devices which were found inside a car when Louis and Kelly were arrested in August 2019, which they used to to track Allen’s movements.
Email accounts were then linked to Kelly and a close associate. From that, police were able to examine 59 Amazon and eBay purchases, which included unregistered Nokia burner phones used to communicate in the murder plot. The Sim had been in use until it vanished from the network shortly before Allen was shot.
DS Matthew Webb from the Met Police told the BBC after the verdicts: “We knew the vehicle had stopped in John Harrison Way and that Kelly got out of the vehicle – but no more than that.
“Didn’t know where he went, didn’t know what happened – just John Harrison Way. Straight away, we were thinking if somebody wants to discard something critical it’s probably going to be a firearm.
“Talk about people being flabbergasted and gobsmacked. Det Insp Matthew Freeman called me and said we have gone to the Thames and found an iPad.
“I can’t repeat the words I used but my jaw dropped. What a beautiful piece of the puzzle to put together.”
The three men will be sentenced on 25 April.
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