Original subtitles

Lots of local residents who were closer to the scene than me

thought a bomb had gone off.

It was like nothing I'd ever heard before.

Where there had been a three-storey building

moments earlier, there was nothing.

It was shocking. Absolutely shocking.

I mean, people speculate, I suppose,

whether this was some sort of terrorist situation,

and we just couldn't answer that... I think it was trying to understand

was there anything else going on?

Once the police learn that there's potential accelerant

used, now we know it's not an accident.

Now we know it's an intentional act.

I look at this as a very typical staged event.

The police are under tremendous pressure.

When you have five victims,

this is something that really is not going to go away.

What then happens is you have a criminal inquiry

involving multiple homicides. - They want to see

what's the payoff? Why would someone do this?

What's the motive? - The owners stood to benefit

and gain a lot of money from destroying the property.

Investigators are going to go backwards

and see where were the owners earlier that day?

This isn't just about claiming insurance money.

This becomes a lot more sinister.

It seemed like they knew what they were doing

and didn't care about the consequences.

Leicester is famously a very mixed community,

lots of different races here. It's a very arty place to live.

It feels like a city where everybody gets on.

It's just a calm, quiet Midlands city,

just getting on with life.

There is crime in Leicester.

As somebody who's lived here for 30 years, I feel safe.

I would walk through the city at night by myself.

I think Leicester sometimes has a bad reputation

for various reasons, but it's not a city

where I feel unsafe.

Leicester is a very busy city, multicultural,

so it's very lively, got good cultural activities

and a goodish football team.

It has been better. I've supported them all the time

I've been here and will continue doing so.

As cities go, I think it's very friendly.

The Hinckley Road area as a very mixed community.

It's got lots of terraced housing,

lots of big houses where established families live.

You will find everybody

in the west end area of Leicester and Hinckley Road.

It's got a great community feel.

Lots of shops, lots of students,

lots of artists. It's a really mixed area.

I would say that people know, for example, the local postmaster,

they know people who run their local shops.

You're likely to meet somebody to say hello to.

You're probably gonna know your neighbours.

There's a lot of community spirit around there.

Hinckley Road was one way out of the city if you like,

as well as one way,

and it's not too far from the city centre,

so it's quite a good place to live. Thinking back,

seemed a very relaxed place to live.

One of the buildings had a shop on the ground floor

and a two-storey flat above.

Living in the flat was the Ragoobeer family.

There was mum Mary, 46.

She worked at the Richard III Visitor Centre in Leicester.

She had been working there for two years,

and she had made a big positive impression.

Dad Jose Ragoobeer, he was 58,

and he worked as a carer in Leicester,

and his employer said at the time

that all his clients loved him so much

because he was caring and compassionate.

His employer described him as amazing,

and one of the kindest people they'd ever met.

The children were Shane, who was 18,

he'd just left school and he was in a relationship

with a young lady called Leah,

and friends described them as made for each other,

and so in love. Friends said that they lit up a room

when they walked in, they were just so, so happy together.

And Shane had actually texted one of his friends

to say he wanted to marry Leah.

There's a younger brother, Sean.

He's 17, and he was taking his exams at school.

Scotty was the youngest brother, he was 15.

They were so well thought of,

really popular and just a normal, good Leicester family

living their lives.

The family moved to the flat in February 2015,

and the flat was above a shop called Zabka.

It was opened by Aram Kurd,

who lived in Leicester, in late 2017.

It was a basic convenience store.

Jose was working, doing his caring job,

and he came home at lunchtime and he had a chat with Shane

about football and a match that was on later that day.

Shane asked him if he could borrow a fiver

from his dad, and his dad said yes

and gave him a fiver, and then his dad went back to work.

It was a Sunday night, about seven o'clock,

and I was at home. I was off work.

I think I was just about to eat my tea,

and I heard an enormous boom.

It was a boom that you felt as well as heard.

I knew immediately that it was an explosion.

It was like nothing I'd ever heard before,

and I ran upstairs to see if I could see anything.

I looked out of the window

and a few hundred yards directly in front of me

was an inferno.

The flames were higher than the roof line.

It was just fire.

It was absolutely shocking.

My first instinct was, what can I do to help?

But I realised really quickly that I was too far away

to be of help, that there would already be a crowd of people there

trying to help, that's the sort of neighbourhood it is, and I heard

immediately that there were sirens.

Yes,

what's the address of the emergency? There's been

a massive explosion... Explosion...

There's been an explosion. - And the screaming sirens

were all I could hear.

This would be deemed by the authorities

to be a major incident, and there would be need

to understand what caused the explosion,

to make sure that other people were safe.

And, of course, it would become evident quite quickly

that there may be people involved and there may be deaths.

So the police, the fire service, gas experts, fire experts,

would all be involved in this as a major incident.

My initial thought was, gas explosion.

If a building, a random building explodes somewhere,

most people are going to think gas explosion.

There were all other rumours going around at the time,

lots of local residents who were closer to the scene than me

thought a bomb had gone off.

Our photographer who I had sent to the scene

got a photograph of a man who had emerged from the rubble

alive, apparently not very badly injured,

and people gathering round him, hugging him, telling him

everything was OK, and that turned out to be Kurd.

Shortly after 11 p.m.,

the Fire and Rescue Service said that six people

were in hospital, and six people being in hospital

had an element of good news about it, because of course

if people are in hospital, you imagine

perhaps their lives can be saved. They said also

that that was the last update they were going to give that night.

So we concluded our reporting soon after

and started again first thing in the morning.

With a building that explodes and collapses

and has caused a fire, it's too hot for anyone to enter.

They suspect there will be bodies. They don't know how many,

but it's very difficult, even with special equipment,

to get in right away to see what happened.

And the building itself was unstable. We don't know

how neighbouring buildings might have been.

So there's a lot of caution. At the same time, there's urgency.

It's a very difficult position to be in.

Initially investigators approach the scene

with an open mind. They don't know if the explosion was an accident,

such as a gas-main break,

or they don't know if it was intentional,

if it was a bomb. They don't know.

It could have been a gas explosion,

and that requires experts from the gas authorities

to be involved. It could have been a terrorist explosion.

or it could have been a petrol vapour explosion.

None of this would have been known at the outset.

So it would require multiple teams of experts,

carrying out a really detailed, careful sifting

of all the evidence that's involved in this case.

When we reported on gas explosions previously,

the cause is named pretty quickly, it's pretty obvious to investigators

that it's a gas explosion. But in this case,

no mention of gas was made.

I mean, people speculate, I suppose,

whether this was some sort of terrorist situation,

and we just couldn't answer that. And nor could the police

at that time. I think it was trying to understand

whether more was going on than, well, say,

just a tragic explosion.

Was there anything else going on?.

Leicestershire Police said that there was no evidence

to suggest it was in any way linked to terror.

My suspicion is that there would be traces of petrol

detectable either in the very early stages,

possibly even at the scene, using portable, detecting equipment,

or quite quickly in the lab. An explosion is a very rapid event.

The blast travels faster than the speed of sound,

over 700 miles an hour.

A fire, whilst it can still be a rapidly developing travel,

it's a much slower developing process.

So one of the things that would have been in investigators' minds

was that if this was a petrol vapour explosion,

a large volume of petrol would have been used.

Depending on the particular configuration

of the building and the ventilation, you get a situation

where you get such a build-up of petrol

that when you try and ignite it, it doesn't burst into flames,

it explodes.

Once the police learn that there's potential accelerant use,

that changes the whole dynamics,

because now we know it's not an accident. Now we know

it's intentional. Arson.

Where there was once a shop and a family home,

there is now just a smouldering gap in the terrace.

It is hard to comprehend the explosion

that reduced it to a pile of debris, easier to understand

how five people lost their lives here.

The police announced that five people had been found dead

in the rubble following the explosion.

It was absolutely shocking.

Heartbreaking.

Late on Monday night, the first picture emerged

of some of the family members who'd lived in the flat

above the shop. The pictures showed Mary Ragoobeer,

her son Shane, and her son Sean.

They were considered missing in the aftermath of the blast.

Also still considered missing was Leah, Shane's girlfriend,

who was with Shane at the flat on the night of the explosion.

The Ragoobeer family were a key part of the local community.

They had lots of friends there, people who knew them,

who valued them, who knew them

as a good local family,

and they were beyond horrified that something so terrible

could have happened to them.

It was shocking. Absolutely shocking.

I learned that Scotty, the youngest at the time,

was in hospital. We realised

that people were coming to a little grassy area

opposite where the explosion took place and laying flowers there,

and we realised

we needed to set up some sort of memorial there,

and that was organised. And it was only gradually

I found the father, who was at work at the time,

and got to know from his point of view

what the situation was. It was very important

that I got in touch with the school, so that we could see

how they were dealing with the situation, because we knew

that the school had a big role to play.

When you have five victims,

this is something that won't go away.

The media won't let this die.

The neighbourhood won't let this die.

The police are under tremendous pressure.

They now have to look at the potential

that somebody intentionally caused this.

The motives could be anything from they want to kill somebody

in the building, they want to claim insurance.

there is some kind of punitive potential there.

There's limited motives, but they really wouldn't be able

to tell immediately what it is.

This scene investigation could take several days,

there's a great deal of very detailed work.

While that is going on, the police would be carrying out inquiries.

Initially, these would be very general inquiries:

who owns the building? And they would be looking into

the background of people who lived there,

the people who owned it. - The person who ran the shop

was called Aram Kurd. He was the shopkeeper.

He'd taken out the lease on the shop, and he ran the shop

day to day. He set up the convenience store.

Kurd was friends with someone called Hawker Hassan,

He was also friends with a man called Arkan Ali.

And Kurd had a girlfriend called Victoria,

who was working at the shop. He employed her at the shop.

Gradually, a picture of the history of this building

and its occupants and recent events would become clearer,

and would basically be the frame for the investigation.

They would be talking to the owners

about who might be in the shop, where they were

when these events happened,

whether they had any potential explanation

for why they happened, and of course

it would gradually unfold from talking to the three men

who were alive that Victoria was probably in the shop

when the explosion took place.

We have to step back and think, who's going to benefit?

We're going to concentrate on the shop itself.

What's the possible benefit? Or is there somebody else

that has specifically targeted this person

to injure them? - They want to see

what's the payoff. Why would someone do this?

What's the motive? And they're going to be looking at

the potential that somebody insured the building or shop.

If Kurd's shop had burned to the ground,

killing his girlfriend, he would want justice.

He's angry. He's horrified.

He's grief-stricken. He's just lost everything,

his livelihood and girlfriend. They will expect certain reactions

from him.

An explosion of this type,

which then becomes a criminal investigation

that involves multiple deaths,

would become a national investigation,

and that adds a layer of difficulty and complexity

to the investigation, because there is constant media desire

for information, which is understandable

and necessary. But it can be a distraction

to the main thrust of the investigation,

which is finding the perpetrators and charging them with the offence.

We knew that at the time of the explosion,

the dad was at work caring for one of his patients,

and Mary and the three boys and Leah

were all at the family home.

And although it was a miracle

that Scotty had survived,

and that his dad had not lost his entire family,

he, a young teenager,

was now in a world where his mum had died,

and his two big brothers had died,

and his big brother's girlfriend had died.

And how anyone, let alone a child,

can begin to process that is unimaginable.

They offered a sort of rest centre,

and people were given help if they needed it.

The school were very involved.

The next thing I remember is the day of the funeral.

I felt the biggest shock was the school.

The effect was demonstrated by how they lined the route

to the cemetery by the school. They stood outside the school

and saw the hearses go by.

It was so moving.

I remember that very clearly.

Being part of the community myself,

it's fair to say that hundreds, thousands of people were shocked

and appalled, and, even if they didn't know the family,

heartbroken by what had happened.

It's unimaginable that so many members of one family

can be lost like that and in such terrible circumstances.

And I know that everybody's hearts

went out to the surviving members of the family.

It's beyond imagination what they were going through.

It may well be that the police were suspicious about it

from quite an early stage. There are two reasons for this:

one is, one of the men who owned the shop was in his car

nearby when the explosion took place,

but claimed not to have heard the explosion. Another man

who was a part-owner of the shop was also seen on CCTV

running away from the rear of the shop

shortly after the explosion took place. What then happens

is you have two parallel investigations

then begin to merge, as this begins to look like a criminal inquiry

involving multiple homicides.

UK police are investigating

a powerful explosion which destroyed a shop and a home

late on Sunday evening. Five people died when a shop

and the flat above were destroyed. - Investigators start looking

for motive. Motive is crucial in a case like this.

Shortly before the explosion, the owners had taken out

a large insurance policy, so they stood to benefit

and gain a lot of money from destroying the property.

That leaves a big question mark and a red flag,

and it makes police start to think

maybe there's a motive here,

and maybe that motive is the insurance money.

Now we're going to expand our canvas again and say,

do you know anybody who's had any problems with them?

Do you know anybody that they've cheated?

Anybody that's made any threats against them?

But at the same token, we're talking to the shop-owners

and say, listen, tell me about your business.

Have any problems with your business? Any insurance?

That's going to be a big one. What's important is

if you find out that there has been recent changes to the insurance,

that they've increased the insurance, or they have gotten

multiple policies, that's another red flag.

They found that there was a recent insurance policy

for £300,000 pounds for the shop, And now a fire

that happened almost at the same time.

We always say coincidences happen. You should never believe them.

When you hear a coincidence,

next thing you hear is probably a lie.

The police also found

that Kurd had purchased a large amount of petrol

three weeks before. As investigators find the policy

and they find that an accelerant has been purchased

in large quantities, they now can really do a thorough search

with the idea that this is about an insurance claim,

but it also involves murder ... So they have to be very careful

about how they process the scene. - The investigators will look for

extra corroborating evidence. They're going to go backwards

and see where were the owners earlier that day?

Check their credit cards, their cell phones,

find out where they were earlier

and would they have been able to set this fire?

At about 2.30, the three conspirators were seen

in a coffee shop in Leicester city centre.

And then later in the afternoon, the three were seen at a restaurant

in the Saint Matthew's area of the city,

and the prosecutors later said that at the time

they were finalising their plans for the explosion.

From CCTV footage, we know that the three,

Kurd, Hassan and Ali, met in a cafe prior to the explosion.

So it appears that police can now identify

at least the core team of accomplices.

Often in conspiracies where there's money involved,

people will start realising when we split this up four ways,

that's a lot less for me.

Who is expendable? The one that seemed most expendable

was Victoria, and I would think

the reason would be they thought she might talk

if pressured. So this way, we get rid of her,

we get rid of the danger of her telling anybody,

and we also get more money for ourselves.

At about 5.30, Kurd arrived

back at the shop, where Victoria was still working.

At the same time, Hassan,

one of the fellow conspirators,

started driving around the area, in the streets around the shop,

in a white Audi, and he did that for the next hour

and the minutes leading up to the explosion.

At 6.56, the third conspirator, Ali,

was seen at the rear of the shop.

He walked towards the shop

and he disappeared from view.

He was then seen leaving the rear of the shop.

Ali was seen on CCTV footage running away from the shop

and running after the slow-moving white Audi,

which was in a side street. He got into the Audi

and it approached the end of the residential street it was in.

To the left was the absolute devastation

that he and his co-conspirators had just caused,

and they turned right, drove away from the scene

and went to Coventry, where they lived.

Kurd had managed to get out of an alleyway

and into a side street and even made his way onto Hinckley Road,

where he was immediately surrounded by people who wanted to help him.

They thought he was a victim. Somebody hugged him

and somebody said to him, you're safe now. You're OK.

But they didn't know, of course, that he was involved.

As police realise they have a conspiracy,

they know that there's going to be a leader,

somebody who had the vision, the plan, who directs everything.

And the likely person is the shopkeeper,

because he's the direct recipient of the insurance money.

He certainly involved his girlfriend in some manner,

and he certainly involved Ali. Hassan looks as if he's involved

in some way. But what they'll be doing

is really pressuring the two accomplices who will benefit.

But accomplices are typically the ones who break.

So they're going to want to get accomplices to turn on Kurd.

The next big update we got was on the Wednesday afternoon,

when police said that three men had been arrested

on suspicion of manslaughter.

We still didn't know the cause of the explosion

at that stage. The police said the men were all in their 30s,

and they said they weren't going to issue any more information

at that time. - One of the problems

with doing any type of arson is, what was the intent?

Was the intent just to cause a little bit of damage

and then claim the insurance?

Or was there another element? I mean, was there actual malice,

we're going to get rid of this witness that we know

happens to be there at the time? That's one of the things

that police must sort out, because if you determine

that this is an intentional act, it wasn't just to destroy the shop,

they had an ulterior motive also to eliminate a potential witness,

and again, somebody they don't have to share money with,

that's a whole different picture. - What police would be thinking

when they realised

that Kurd might have actually set up his girlfriend to die

shows that he's pretty cold-hearted, maybe a psychopath,

and they have to be very careful about how they question him,

because he will have no remorse about what he did.

This isn't just about claiming insurance money,

this becomes a lot more sinister. And he will have created a narrative

to protect himself at anybody else's cost.

He'll turn on anybody else to keep his narrative going.

Another thing the police have to determine

is whether or not this was an intentional act

concerning those who lived above. Was the fire started

when they know nobody was upstairs? Or was it started

when they knowingly knew someone was upstairs?

Second thing is, how much accelerant was used?

Was it just enough to start a fire in order to destroy the shop?

Or was it specifically designed to burn the entire place down?

That's something that the police are going to have to determine.

There's a big question mark about whether the perpetrators knew

or should have known there was a family living above,

and knew or should have known there were people in the building

at the time they said the explosion.

And that's important,

because it would have been manslaughter if they didn't know,

if they were not aware that there were people

in the building and they didn't intend

or didn't believe that there were people going to be hurt.

And that would change if the perpetrators knew

or should have known that there were people

in the building when they set the fire.

The difference between manslaughter and murder is intent.

Murder requires intent. Manslaughter does not.

The charge was changed to murder.

I look at this as a very typical staged event.

wherein there's an accidental fire in order to get insurance.

What's important is we go back and we say,

hey, there's the increase of the insurance,

there's all the steps they took to get all the materials.

It's very clear. This is the first time

that they've actually done an arson, but it's not our first arson.

We know what we're looking for. We know what's there.

The three men are accused, and they come to court

and they say they're not guilty,

they were not involved in anything nefarious.

It's likely that when Kurd chose his accomplices,

he had ensured that they were going to be loyal,

that they'd keep their mouths shut. I think in part it was fear,

but in part it was a sense of loyalty

and connection, because they all came from the same country together.

They were in the same community, and they kind of

have nothing to lose by sticking by their story.

As the trial is approaching, the media is covering this,

because five people died, and there were multiple injuries,

and other buildings were put at risk.

So this is a significant community event,

and people are attuned to wanting the perpetrators

to be found guilty and be held accountable.

People are angry and they want to know

who had done this and why they'd done it,

and how whatever it was that had happened

had led to so many deaths.

I've been reporting on stories in Leicester for 25 years,

and I've never encountered an incident that was as horrific,

and that caused so much fury

and so much disbelief.

So it transpired that the shop that Kurd had opened

wasn't doing very well, and he and his two conspirators

decided to do what is commonly known as

an insurance job on the shop.

They decided that they would blow it up,

claim the insurance money.

Victoria also knew of the plan.

She was involved in taking out the insurance policy

for the shop, so she knew what was going on.

But the three men thought that she knew too much.

So on the night of the explosion, Kurd left Victoria in the shop

as he went to the storeroom to get the beer,

knowing the explosion was about to happen,

knowing that he was near the door, he could escape.

He left her to die as well.

He comes across as highly self-centred,

psychopathic, without remorse,

sacrificing his girlfriend after getting her help.

So he's a particularly bad character for people.

The issue for me was being present in the court

so I could hear first-hand, you know, what they said went on,

and... I think

that's what I felt then and now

is what a waste of young lives,

purely for money.

It was a young family.

They were lovely people. And what a waste.

I think part of what the jury has to grapple with

is these guys are lighting a building on fire,

they have no idea how far-reaching this would be,

how many fatalities and injuries it could potentially have,

but they do it anyway, and I think that's part of it is

not just that they knowingly killed people

who are in the apartments, but they knowingly

put many people at risk.

They couldn't have controlled what happened,

and they did it anyway. So the sense of calculation

just for financial gain and nothing more

is astonishing to people. This is so petty.

People died and were injured

for something as small as a financial incentive.

The fact that the defendants showed no emotion

would come across as seeming indifferent

and without any kind of remorse,

without any sense of what they had done.

The jury will, as they're coming to grips with the evidence

and thinking these guys are guilty, are seeing people

who just don't care,. and that will also be alienating.

After hearing all the evidence, the jury ultimately decided

that the three conspirators were guilty of murder.

That meant the jury was sure

that those three men knew the flat was occupied

when they caused the explosion to happen.

That's.... it's hard to put into words, isn't it? Honestly.

That, to me, is beyond evil.

I think people saw it as justice

that they didn't get away completely,

although I think any thought s about justice

was about how terrible it was this family lost their lives.

Nearly a whole family.

So it was important that they'd got their dues.

But I think the greater thought was about how tragic this was.

It was done as an act of insurance,

you know, just to get money.

But how you link those two at the time was quite difficult,

I think, really. How did Jose and Scotty,

how did they deal with that?

Their mother and their two brothers, and then Leah were killed.

I mean, it's just dreadful.

It seemed like they knew what they were doing...

...and didn't care about the consequences.

I felt it there as well.

But afterwards, when you're picking up, you know,

picking up the pieces, trying to adjust

and see what's going on, that's when you felt it.

This was such a cold and calculated plan

to stage an explosion just to benefit from the insurance.

The insurance payout was £300,000.

So each of these co-conspirators

stood to gain £100,000 apiece.

It's tragic to think that these three people

were so focused on getting money

that they put the value of human life

below the money that they stood to gain.

No amount of jail time is going to bring back mothers,

fathers, friends, people who were lost or harmed

during this explosion.

There's no amount... there is no amount of years,

there's no amount of prison that can bring back a human life.

It just doesn't seem to make any sense

that somebody thought that gain was worth killing just one person,

let alone five, and putting the entire area at risk.

It doesn't seem worth it. It's really hard to fathom a mind

that could calculate like this

and think walking away with even £100,000

for their share made this worth it.

Going back there, you could see the effect

of what was a huge explosion. because the gap.

The city council or some company. put fencing around the area,

not to hide it but to make it safe.

People talking about, what are we going to do?

Are we going to fill that gap? The idea going around,

we need to make it into a little park.

But what we did was make a little park memorial opposite.

I hope that people still remember that in some way.

For most people, it's impossible to imagine

something like this affecting their family.

And I cannot begin to imagine

how Jose and Scotty

and Leah's family

even began to rebuild their lives,

if they've managed to rebuild their lives after.

Of course, the impact on those families

will be there forever.

There's the tragedy, and there's the crime,

the explosion. In terms of the tragedy,

you can't you can't foretell how you could deal with that.

You just make sure that you've got people

supporting and around. That goes on for some time. It doesn't stop.

It's going to take time for the community to heal

from this tragedy and to heal from this loss,

and there's also a physical scar, a physical reminder

that will always be there. Every time anyone walks by the place

where this building was,

they're going to be reminded of what happened there.

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