Four senior British police officers are under investigation over allegations of misconduct for partaking in a gangland killing case, news reports said.

Staffordshire Police launched an inquiry into the murder of amateur footballer Kevin Nunes, 20, who was gunned down in a country lane in 2002, British media reported. 

Nunes, a drug dealer who had been on the books of Tottenham Hotspur, was shot dead in an execution style killing after a gang dispute. 

His killers, Levi Walker, Antonio Christie, Adam Joof, Michael Osbourne and Owen Crooks were all jailed for life after being found guilty of murder by a jury at Leicester Crown Court. 

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) will look into the handling of the investigation into case of the four officers, including the lead on police ethics. Five men were jailed in connection with the killing in 2008. 

The IPCC confirmed that formal notice of investigation had been served on “a number of former and serving Staffordshire Police officers”. 

Meanwhile, Northamptonshire Police Authority confirmed that its force's chief constable Adrian Lee and deputy chief constable Suzette Davenport were being investigated. 

Lee is also the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers' ethics portfolio.

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teenager who murdered a 16-year-old schoolboy outside a pub in Stretford has denied his motive was revenge for another gangland killing.

 

A teenager who murdered a 16-year-old schoolboy outside a pub in Stretford has denied his motive was revenge for another gangland killing. Moses Mathias told Manchester Crown Court he intended to commit a robbery but instead fired at a vehicle carrying Giuseppe Gregory out of "fear for my life". He said he did not learn of the death in May 2009 until the next day. Àt the age of 15 he later went on the run. Mathias, now 18, remained at large until he was arrested in Amsterdam earlier this year on a European Arrest Warrant after a joint investigation by the Serious Organised Crime Agency and GMP. He was flown back to the UK in June and four months later admitted the murder of the youngster who was gunned down in the early hours of May 11 in a car outside the Robin Hood pub in Stretford. In March 2010, Mathias's associates Njabulo Ndlovu and Hiruy Zerihun, then aged 19 and 18, were jailed for life and ordered to serve minimum terms of 21 years and 23 years respectively after they were convicted of Giuseppe's murder. Their trial heard the pair carried out the attack in revenge for the murder of Zerihun's boyhood friend Louis Brathwaite, also 16, who was shot dead in a betting shop in Withington, south Manchester, in January 2008. They were affiliated to Fallowfield Man Dem, a splinter group of the notorious Gooch Gang, who targeted Giuseppe and his friends because of their association to the rival gang the Longsight Crew. Mathias, of no fixed address, also admitted possessing - with Zerihun and Ndlovu - an imitation firearm, a self-loading pistol, a .32 pistol and six .32 bullet cartridges. But now he has argued the basis of his plea and claimed he did not know Louis Brathwaite, saying in evidence that the plan was to enter the pub and "rob the tills".

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Brits who invested their savings in their adopted countries may not be able to withdraw cash and could even lose their homes if banks call in loans

Marbella, Andalusia, Spain (pic: Getty)

EMERGENCY evacuation plans for Brits living in Spain and Portugal are being drawn up amid fears of the euro collapsing.

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The drastic proposals emerged as a former Security Minister warned expats could be left stranded and destitute by the break-up of the single currency.

Brits who invested their savings in their adopted countries may not be able to withdraw cash and could even lose their homes if banks call in loans, worried ministers are warning.

The Foreign Office is preparing to bring them back from Spain and Portugal if the two countries are forced out of the euro, triggering a banking collapse.

A million Brits live in Spain and 50,000 in neighbouring Portugal – plus a million in the other eurozone countries.

And Baroness Neville-Jones, who only stepped down as a minister in May, called the situation “very, very worrying”.

The Tory peer – who once chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee for MI5, MI6 and other security agencies – said: “Spain is clearly a vulnerable area. If that happens, one of the things that will happen in a crash of that kind, is that the banks would close their doors. You would find that there are people there, including our own citizens, a lot of them, who couldn’t get money out to live on. So you would have a destitution problem.”

British planes, ships and coaches could be sent to pluck our citizens from debt-ridden Spain and Portugal

Commenting on the evacuation plans, she added: “I think they are right to be doing that. I think this is a real contingency that they need to plan against – very, very worrying.”

Officials are braced for a nightmare scenario where thousands end up penniless and sleeping at airports with no means of getting home. Planes, ships and coaches could be sent, with some expats being brought out through Gibraltar.

The Foreign Office could offer small loans while piling pressure on the banks to give Brits access to their funds.

Spanish and Portuguese banks guarantee the first 100,000 euros deposited by savers but many put limits on withdrawals in a crisis.

A powerful credit rating agency downgraded 10 Spanish banks last week, while another warned over the weekend the debt crisis was threatening to spiral out of control.

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Spanish king forced son-in-law to quit job in 2006

 

 

King Juan Carlos told his son-in-law in 2006 to cut ties with a company now mired in corruption allegations, an official at Spain's royal palace said Sunday. Authorities are probing the activities of a non-profit company run by Inaki Urdangarin between 2004 and 2006. "(The king) ordered him to stand down from his activities and he sold his shares," said the official, who works at the royal palace's press office, confirming reports in the Spanish press. "He was told he shouldn't work for himself and it would be better if he worked overseas." Urdangarin, 43, also known as the Duke of Palma de Mallorca, now works for Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica in Washington, where he lives with with his wife, Infanta Cristina. The scandal, the first to hit Spain's royal family in years, centres on Urdangarin's time at the helm of the Instituto Noos, now suspected of siphoning off money from contracts paid by the regional government of the Balearic Islands, where the institute is based. The royal palace did not uncover any lies or fraud in 2006, the source said. However, a royal legal advisor found signs the Noos institute was possibly involved in commercial activities not consistent its non-profit mission. On December 12, the royal palace froze Urdangarin out of official activities over the scandal. The royal family traditionally maintains a discreet profile in Spain, where Juan Carlos is widely respected, credited with guiding the country to democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. The scandal has nevertheless caused anger at a time when ordinary Spaniards are being squeezed by spending cuts and a lack of jobs, with an unemployment rate of 21.5 percent. 

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Spain's longest-serving inmate received a government pardon yesterday that saw him and his family convinced that he would walk free immediately

After 35 years in jail and eight successful breakout attempts, Spain's longest-serving inmate received a government pardon yesterday that saw him and his family convinced that he would walk free immediately – only for him to remain behind bars.

Since 1976, Spanish courts have found Miguel Angel Montes Neiro guilty of more than 30 robberies and armed burglaries, many committed while on the run. But even as a spokesman for the Spanish government, Jose Blanco, confirmed yesterday that Montes Neiro, 61, had received a pardon for two of his multiple crimes, another outstanding sentence – for robbery and illicit possession of firearms – will see him remain in jail.

Montes Neiro, from the province of Granada in southern Andalusia, was predictably delighted when news of the pardon broke yesterday lunchtime, telling his family by phone: "Don't come to the prison gates when I get out, I want to walk the first two or three kilometres so I can feel the fresh air like a free man."

However, it emerged that his pardon was only partial and that a court review of a 13-year sentence was still pending.

Montes Neiro spent his first night in the cells in 1966, aged 16, when he was arrested for stealing a packet of cigarettes. His first formal sentence came a decade later for desertion – but not before he had spent 10 days in army prison for stealing a sub-machine gun.

During his numerous breakouts, the most recent in 2009 when he spent two hours on self-imposed parole to attend the wake for his mother, Montes Neiro found the time to marry twice and have two children – and to commit a string of hold-ups and kidnaps.

Montes Neiro's record is as varied as it is long. He has been convicted of beating up hostages on three occasions, and he once formed part of a gang that broke into a Granada home and threatened to cut off a man's thumb unless his wife revealed the location of his safe.

His escapes include one from a maximum security prison in the Spanish colony of Ceuta in 1979, but perhaps his most dramatic breakout came in 1981: after hanging himself in a staged suicide bid, breaking two ribs, he escaped from prison hospital in a taxi.

On the run for a total of three years, his repeated recapture was facilitated by his tendency to remain in or near his home town. His one spell abroad, in Morocco, ended when he returned to Granada because he missed his family.

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Spanish, Italian police smash drug smuggling ring

 

Spanish and Italian police made five arrests while busting a drug-trafficking ring that for years smuggled cocaine from South America to Europe, investigators said on Friday. The group arranged for narcotics to be put on merchant ships headed to Europe. Just before the vessels arrived at their destination, the smugglers would dump cocaine packages overboard, Spanish police said in a statement. Members of the gang waiting in inflatable boats would then pick up the cocaine and take it to shore, from where it was distributed to customers in Spain and Italy, officials said.Two members of the group were detained in the Italian port city of Genoa in March in a joint operation by Spanish and Italian police. Police detained another three members of the group, including its leader, three months later in the northwestern Spanish coastal region of Galicia. "During the search of the home of the ringleader, police found a vault camouflaged behind the wall of the cellar, which housed security cameras that monitored the rest of the house as well as two large safes, cash, valuable watches, computer equipment and documents," police said in the statement. Police also seized 55 kilos (120 pounds) of cocaine, three cash-counting machines and five cars. Spain is the main gateway to Europe for cocaine from Latin America and for cannabis from north Africa

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father of three was killed in bed near his sleeping wife and children when his house was sprayed with bullets in a drive-by shooting

 

Oakland police say a father of three was killed in bed near his sleeping wife and children when his house was sprayed with bullets in a drive-by shooting. Officer Kevin McDonald said one of many bullets passed through a wall and hit 46-year-old mechanic Thourn Nhep, who was pronounced dead at the scene when police arrived Saturday. Neighbors say a mid-size sedan sped away after the shooting. McDonald tells the Oakland Tribune (http://bit.ly/s7iXXn) the shooting was not random, but did not give further details of who was targeted and why. No one had been arrested. Nhep's 18-year-old daughter Sok told the Tribune it was the third time the house had been shot at recently. Sok said her father was a "good guy" who had nothing to do with violence.

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The alleged members of the Dominican-based Trinitarios gang all face charges of racketeering, narcotics conspiracy and gun trafficking

Suspects accused of selling guns and drugs.

Authorities collared 38 Bronx and upper Manhattan gangbangers Wednesday after a two-year probe into a notorious crew, officials said.

The alleged members of the Dominican-based Trinitarios gang all face charges of racketeering, narcotics conspiracy and gun trafficking, authorities said.

The undercover investigation — which involved officers from the NYPD, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Homeland Security — netted about $25,000 worth of drugs and 12 firearms in Wednesday’s raid, police said.

One weapon recovered, a Mac-11 machine gun, was painted the same shade of green the gang uses in its colors.

Federal prosecutors said the crew committed and planned violent acts, including murder, to protect its turf from rival gangs that include the Bloods, Crips, the Latin Kings and Dominicans Don’t Play.

“We believe we put a big dent in the Trinitarios gang,” said Capt. Lorenzo Johnson, the commanding officer of the NYPD’s Bronx gang squad.

Six people who were connected to the gang members were also arrested, police said. Authorities were still looking for about 12 other members of the gang.

Prosecutors said the Trinitarios sold firearms, including semiautomatic rifles, a shotgun and handguns, and transported them across state lines.

Numerous members of the Trinitarios who were arrested are also members of a smaller splinter gang, the Bad Boys, prosecutors said.

Johnson said most of suspects were already “known to the department in some manner,” and had long terrorized several blocks in Washington Heights and parts of the Bronx, including Marble Hill.

“Anytime we can help the community feel safer is a good day,” he said.

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Glenn Mulcaire, the private eye at the centre of the News of the World phone hacking scandal, has been arrested

 

Glenn Mulcaire, the private eye at the centre of the News of the World phone hacking scandal, has been arrested by Scotland Yard detectives pursuing a fresh investigation into phone intercepts, according to a person familiar with the inquiry. Officers working on Operation Weeting – the Metropolitan Police’s second probe into phone hacking at News International, which owned the now-defunct Sunday tabloid – announced on Wednesday that they had arrested a 41-year-old man who was being held on suspicion of conspiracy to hack voicemail messages and perverting the course of justice.  Mr Mulcaire is the 16th person to be arrested under the new operation, and has already served a six-month prison sentence in 2007 after pleading guilty to intercepting phone messages. He was arrested at his home in Surrey in a dawn swoop and held in a south London police station. Detectives on Operation Weeting have used the private investigator’s notebooks – which contain the names of nearly 5,800 potential victims and run to around 11,000 pages – as the basis for their investigation, trawling through the documents to identify those who may have been hacked. The hacking scandal was reignited this summer when it was revealed that the News of the World had hacked into the voicemail messages of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler after she went missing in 2002, leading her parents to believe that she was still alive. Last month, Mr Mulcaire released a statement through his lawyer, denying that he had deleted voicemail messages on Ms Dowler’s phone. “[He] did not delete messages and had no reason to do so,” the statement read. The Financial Times could not reach Mr Mulcaire’s lawyer for comment on Wednesday. Chris Bryant, a Labour MP and suspected hacking victim, told the FT he was “quite encouraged” that Mr Mulcaire had been taken in for questioning. “I always thought this was a logical next step, but not one [the police] would take unless they had sufficient fresh evidence to put to [Mr Mulcaire], and it seems now they do,” he said. News of the arrest came as lawyers for Andy Coulson, the News of the World’s former editor, argued in the High Court on Wednesday that the tabloid’s parent company should continue to pay Mr Coulson’s legal bills arising from the criminal investigation into phone hacking. It emerged during the course of Mr Coulson’s evidence that News Group Newspapers – a subsidiary of News International – had continued to reimburse Mr Coulson for legal fees relating to his involvement in the judge-led phone hacking inquiry and parliamentary select committee hearings. The court heard that Mr Coulson had received a letter from Tom Mockridge, the chief executive of News International, in August informing him of an “immediate cessation” of payments in relation to criminal legal fees.

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