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PHONE LINE RINGS

ON PHONE:Police. What's your emergency?

Armed police officers!

Elite police units created to crack the toughest of cases.

My role is investigating serious and organised crime.

This was out of the ordinary

and this was a high-pressure situation.

Calm yourself down.

Their task? Tackle the villains...

You're locked up on suspicion of murder, all right?

..and bring them to justice.

A real who-did-it.

With unique access to some of Britain's most talented detectives,

we explore, for the first time, their investigations...

We've spent years putting together

all of these tiny pieces of evidence...their methods...

The most bizarre investigation I've been involved in.

..and the evidence that's put some of the UK's

most dangerous criminals behind bars.

They look clever, and they're dangerous.

On a quiet spring evening

in the peaceful commuter village of Greenhithe,

the silence is suddenly shattered by the sound of gunshots.

GUNSHOTS

Just moments before the firearm was discharged,

it was evident that there was somebody

running up and down the road.

A man with serious gunshot wounds is rushed to A&E,

lucky to be alive.

So, guns are really serious weapons to have,

particularly if you are just randomly shooting them

in different directions.

As the situation rapidly escalates,

a dangerous armed gunman is loose on the streets.

I think, if you're pointing a gun and pulling the trigger,

then you're only intending to do one thing, aren't you?

Someone has obviously tried to kill somebody.

Firearm crimes are at an all-time high

at 6,645 recorded offences this year alone.

SIRENS WAIL

And yet, for some forces,

street shoot-outs are almost unheard of.

My name's Gavin Moss.

I'm currently the detective superintendent

for the Major, Serious and Economic Crime department.

Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate

is a number of departments that are formed together

to effectively tackle serious, organised, and major crime.

I was the senior investigating officer

for this investigation.

Greenhithe is a village in Kent

with a waterfront adjoining the estuary of the River Thames.

Greenhithe, like many areas, does have crime.

It'd be wrong of me to say it doesn't.

But in terms of the type of incident

that we're going to be talking about today,

that's very unusual.

Sunday 8th of March 2020

is looking like any other Sunday night,

as Kent Police tackle everyday crimes.

The first Kent Police were made aware of an incident

was the report on the three-nines call

of theft of motorcycles

that was taking place in the area of Greenhithe.

Residents in the area have spotted a gang

attempting to steal motorbikes from a nearby car park.

So, officers attended.

They made inquiries in the local area,

spoke to the original person who made the call,

but the individuals who were involved

in the taking of those motorcycles weren't there. They'd disappeared.

The individuals themselves were covering their faces.

They were wearing hoodies.

We were unable to identify who it actually was.

With no sign of the bike thieves,

officers routinely scope the crime scene for clues.

But just over a mile away, at Darent Valley Hospital,

it's a very different story.

A 31-year-old man has been admitted with two serious gunshot wounds.

Firearm cases in Kent are rare, but they do happen.

Protocol is that the hospital, quite rightly,

made Kent Police aware of this

because we need to obviously protect the public as much as we can,

and we need to deploy resources to it.

Officers arrive only to discover that

this isn't the victim's first contact with the police.

He's been released from prison early

and is out on licence for GBH.

He was treated for two injuries to his left arm.

One of the bullets went right through his arm.

The other one shattered part of his bone.

The police are now on high alert,

fearing there's an unknown gunman on the loose in Greenhithe.

Officers try to get a coherent statement

from the injured man.

He wasn't in a good place.

The injuries weren't deemed to be life-threatening,

but certainly life-changing.

It's a huge concern for us because these incidents can be fatal,

and we need to do our utmost

to try and recover those firearms that have been used.

It was a case of beginning to piece it all together.

But piecing it together from

the victim with the gunshot wounds is not straightforward.

The victim wasn't exactly forthcoming,

which can skew an investigation

because you're hoping to know exactly where, when, how, etc.

But this particular victim chose not to tell us that.

It's really suspicious.

Why on earth wouldn't you tell?

So, we're kind of on the back foot from the beginning right away,

which makes it challenging for us.

First-response officers continue to investigate

the theft of some superbikes from a residential car park.

I'm PC Jack Bray.

I work on the local policing team at North Kent Police Station.

My colleague and I turned out straight away to the scene.

All we were told was that someone had tried to steal some motorbikes,

and that the bikes were owned by two brothers

that lived where they were being kept.

It transpires the bikes are of super high value,

totalling over £50,000.

We wanted to look for any CCTV opportunities

to see if there's anything covering

where the bikes have been stolen from.

They were walking in the area,

and then one of the officers kicked something on the floor.

METALLIC CLINKING But we didn't know

what that was at the time.

We had a closer look at it and we realised it was a bullet casing.

Bullet casings aren't common on the pavements of Greenhithe.

Finding the bullet casing was pretty scary.

It's gone from a simple theft of a motor vehicle

to somebody discharging a firearm.

This isn't what it seems.

Further casings could then be seen,

and then further round in the car park area,

there were more casings that had been found.

A spray of casings on this scale

suggests a major firefight has taken place.

Could the gunshot victim be connected

to the theft of the bikes?

You can expect it to be chaotic in the first few hours

because there's a lot of information coming in,

and it's about bringing order to chaos.

Officers go house to house to gather information.

When inquiries were made with the local residents,

their belief was that

this was some fireworks that had been let off.

Local residents were shocked to find out that

what they thought were harmless fireworks

were, in actual fact, gunshots echoing around their homes.

It probably had quite a negative effect

on the people that lived there.

The officers try urgently to determine the identity

of the two men seen running from the building.

We spoke to a couple of neighbours

who told us that the bikes were owned by these two brothers

that had lived in the flat

pretty much next to where the bikes were being kept.

The brothers are nowhere to be seen when officers first call.

As the evening progresses,

the crime scene investigators continue to comb the area,

and suddenly...

It was around an hour and a half since we'd been at the scene

that the brothers actually arrive.

I saw some headlights coming up behind me

and saw the vehicle parked,

and I quickly realised that they had returned.

Officers start to question the brothers.

They appeared really nervous, quite erratic,

asking us what was going on. We couldn't tell them much,

but we told them that there was a crime scene on,

and that made them quite agitated.

We told them that some bikes had been stolen

and that there were still three in the car park.

It was almost like they were putting it on

to show that they were shocked that their bikes had been stolen.

We were treating them as victims of a theft of a motor vehicle.

We ideally wanted to get

some more information from them about those bikes.

BEEPING

They told us they had some documents for the bikes inside their flat,

so we approached their flat, intending to go inside with them.

We went to follow them in,

but the older brother physically stopped

one of my colleagues and pushed him back.

What could lie behind that door?

It's an unsettling night for police in Dartford, Kent.

Gun crime is one of the most serious of offences for police and courts,

and a gunman is on the loose.

Officers are attempting to lock down the scene of a firefight

that's littered with bullet casings.

A mile away, the victim of a near-fatal shooting

has been admitted to Darent Valley Hospital.

It's not every day that somebody turns up with a gunshot,

and it's not every day you find a bullet casing.

I didn't think it was a coincidence.

It completely changes your perspective

on the whole incident.

Someone has obviously tried to kill somebody.

Events are escalating fast.

Is there a lone gunman at large,

or could two apparently unemployed brothers,

and the victims of a motorbike theft,

be involved in the shooting?

We had to restrain the elder brother

to prevent anything from escalating from that point.

We had to treat the brothers as victims of crime

because their bikes had been stolen,

but at the same time, we knew that something wasn't right.

So, for quite a while, we were outside their flat,

looking at some documents, trying to establish

the identity of the bikes that had been stolen.

Two out of their five bikes have been stolen,

and the location of the gun used in the shooting is still unknown.

Tensions are high.

One of my firearms colleagues,

he was speaking to somebody on his radio.

He had some vital information

that pretty much changed the entire investigation.

They made some quick decisions.

With the neighbours witnessing the brothers running outside

as the shooting starts, the situation escalates...

..and the officers initiate State 9,

which is code for make an immediate arrest.

Then all hell breaks loose.

So, one of the brothers, when he was arrested, was compliant.

The other one was obstructive, verbally abusive to officers,

calling them various unsavoury names.

And all I remember was him shouting, swearing,

and he just kept repeating, "Attempted murder? Really?"

over and over again.

They were arrested just after 11 o'clock

on Sunday the 8th of March,

and they were then interviewed the following day.

OFFICER:Just asking you, straight to the point,

did you try and kill someone yesterday

by shooting them?SUSPECT:No.

All I'm going to say right now is that

I had nothing to do with attempting to kill anyone.Mm-hm.

I wouldn't do something like that.

And I'm going to give "no comment" on everything

because I don't trust the police.

The interview gets them nowhere

and the brothers don't even want to press charges

against the bike thieves.

They maintained "no comment" interviews throughout

and denied any involvement.

Did you discharge a firearm at anybody

on Sunday the 8th of March? SUSPECT:No comment.

More often than not, people will go "no comment",

and that brings on the challenge for us

because we have to prove the case beyond all reasonable doubt

to get a successful prosecution.

And the maximum we can have people in custody for is 96 hours.

In this particular case, we were really close to the wire.

With the suspected shooter in custody and the clock ticking,

DSI Moss and his team

have the mammoth task of gathering evidence.

They launch Operation Zori.

Crime scene investigators

have already started to examine the scene.

My name's Emma Jennings.

I'm a forensic operations coordinator

working with Kent Police.

There's huge pressures that you're under

when you're examining a scene like this,

particularly in a residential street.

Because we didn't know

what direction the guns had been shot in,

we actually needed to look at all the houses

on the other side of the road, as well,

to piece together the jigsaw.

So, that's what a crime scene exam is all about.

You've got some of the bits, but you need to find

all of the other bits and put them together.

Emma's first challenge is to establish

whether the wounded man in hospital

is part of the gang responsible for stealing the two superbikes.

We had people who'd been shot at

and who'd made off potentially on foot.

They'd cut through a hole in the hedge

at the back of the car park, so they'd run through the vehicles

and through the hedge, out onto the grassy area beyond.

We didn't know what route they'd taken,

so I called out our evidence recovery dogs.

So, they can sniff out blood or clothing

that might have been discarded along the route.

But the dogs find nothing...

..so the CSI team focus the search elsewhere.

It was quite a big car park.

There were a number of bullet casings throughout.

I think there were six in total.

They were all 9mm casings.

And then, outside, going into the main road,

you had a block of flats.

And just outside that block of flats,

all along the pavement, you had a series of parked vehicles.

And in front of one of the vehicles, you had a cluster of

a number of other bullet casings on the ground.

With 15 casings found, this has been a huge firefight,

but it's still a mystery as to whether the shooters

were the motorcycle thieves, the brothers, or both.

When I reviewed the scene,

I realised it probably needed to be extended

cos the bullets can travel a really long way.

We needed to get an idea of the direction

that the shooter may have been shooting in.

Under warrant,

detailed house searches are carried out...

..and the bullet casings found at the scene

are sent for DNA testing.

There's a lot of things that you have to consider,

and it's literally a case of piecing together a big jigsaw

to work out and show exactly what's happened

to present to a jury.

DSI Moss battles to connect the attempted theft

of the motorbikes and the bullet casings.

I know a little bit about firearms, but I'm not an expert.

I need an expert to help me understand

how this has been committed.

How can you explain all of those casings on the floor?

There's always a challenge when you examine a crime scene,

and the challenge is to interpret what had happened,

because in most cases, there are no witnesses.

My name is Andre Horne,

and I'm a senior forensic firearms scientist.

When I arrived at the scene,

there was no clear understanding

of who the shooters were,

whether the shooters were both parties - in other words,

the people attempting to load the motorcycles into the van

or the owners. And had they been firing at one another

or had it just been one party shooting at the other?

So, that was part of my brief - to try and determine,

from the physical evidence at the scene, what had happened.

So, when we find ejected cartridge cases at a crime scene,

that gives us an indication of

where the shooter may have been standing.

We know that most guns eject to the right and to the rear.

The firearm calibres that were present at the scene

were 9mm Luger...

..and .40 Smith & Wesson.

Bullets with a calibre of .40 of an inch

are actually larger in diameter

and probably more powerful

than the 9mm,

and they're capable of causing more damage.

The different calibres mean that there were two different shooters

with different guns at two locations.

Because of the different locations -

we had a series here and a cluster here -

I didn't know whether there'd been, like, a shoot-out

between two different groups of people.

And with the custody deadline coming closer,

the mystery must be solved,

or the shooters could be back out on the streets.

You know they're responsible.

You know you want to protect the public.

You know you want to stop them from further offending.

The pressure is there, definitely. The pressure is there.

Kent Police are hunting two gunmen.

Two people are in custody,

but it's still a mystery as to what has happened at the scene.

The CSI team have marked up the discarded casings

from the shooter in the car park.

And some of that bullet damage was all the way through,

say, hitting vehicles, bouncing off vehicles.

Those bullets will keep travelling.

Andre needs to follow the path of the bullets

in order to decipher what's happened.

I managed to find and identify

two bullet impact marks on the ground.

I got on my hands and knees

and started looking for bullet impact marks

on the white BMW.

On this image, you can see a bullet fragment,

indicated by my scene arrow there.

And I suspect that this is part of the fragment

that had struck the undercarriage of the BMW.

Andre also finds bullet fragments on the adjacent red car.

You can see the ricochet mark,

and I can see direction going from the left to the right,

so that is entirely consistent with where the cartridge case

at marker 10 was.

So, I have direction,

and I have a clear possibility

that the cartridge case discovered near the entrance to the car park,

and this discharge, are associated.

So, I continued looking

and I found another impact mark higher up,

probably 10m, 15m from the first impact mark.

You don't expect a shooter to fire a shot at 10,

run up, fire a shot at the other end of the parking lot,

run back down and fire another shot down here,

so there's a natural progression.

Andre then turns his attention

to the second cluster of casings on the road outside the car park.

It was fairly obvious that the shooter

appears to have been stationary

and that he had not been moving about.

My interpretation was

there were two shooting scenes at this address -

one where the shooter was stationary

and one where there was clearly some movement from the shooter.

It looks like the picture from the jigsaw is slowly emerging.

When they attended the scene with a view to steal the bikes,

the brothers had come out of their address

and started shooting at the offenders.

The last two cartridge cases we found in the car park,

I could not associate them with any of the other impact marks.

Those bullets may have struck the victim.

They may have gone through the victim.

I came to the conclusion that one of the shooters -

the one with the 9mm firearm -

appears to have discharged the shot at the victim in this case.

The theory now is that one brother ran after

and shot the victim in the car park,

whilst the other waited next to the van

to shoot anyone trying to escape.

PC JACK BRAY:We suspected that they weren't just

your average victim of theft of motor vehicles,

but we didn't really have any concrete information

to suggest that it was them that pulled the trigger at this point.

With nothing concrete connecting the bullets to the brothers,

it's going to be a battle to keep them in custody.

We felt there was suspicion around their involvement.

Was it likely? It was a strong possibility.

But we didn't have the hard and fast evidence that we wanted,

so, at that moment in time,

we were faced with many challenges to really try and work it all out -

what had happened,

whether it was random, or whether it was targeted.

This was a complex investigation.

And the clock is ticking.

The team are desperate for visual evidence

of the brothers' involvement.

We had real challenges with CCTV.

We did know that, around the brothers' home address,

they had CCTV cameras.

Officers are suspicious as to why

the brothers' sophisticated CCTV is so extensive outside.

It appears a bit unusual, even for watching over

their high-value cars and superbikes.

There was a camera outside in a tree,

which was positioned just above where the motorcycles were located.

And they were internet, cloud-based cameras,

that meant we had to make inquiries with America.

The brothers refused them permission to view the footage.

The only way to access it from the US-based company

is to take the official route.

We had to liaise with the FBI

in order to provide us some assistance.

It's not as swift as you'd like it to be.

You know, it's not a case of picking up the phone

or sending an email. Albeit it's a priority for me,

it's not a priority for the company in America,

it's not a priority for the American officials,

and that became really challenging.

It's impossible to access the images within their tight time frame,

but they discover they could view one of the cameras

in the security system without the brothers' permission.

There was one particular camera that was positioned

from inside the property that looked out of the front window.

That was a British-based company,

so we were able to access that footage fairly quickly.

It did show, just moments before the firearm was discharged,

it was evident that there was somebody

running up and down the road,

and then you could hear the gun being discharged.

GUNSHOTS

But the window within the property was really misted up,

and you just couldn't see and identify who that person was.

With time running out to hold the suspects,

they need a break.

It was really frustrating

cos that would have been the absolute icing on the cake,

but crime investigation's like that.

You hope and you expect to get the evidence to land

right in front of you, and sometimes it's more challenging

than you really think it'll be.

Leaving no stone unturned,

the investigators focus on new drone technology

for aerial reconnaissance and on 360-degree photography.

It was quite a large scene, so I asked for drone footage.

There was cut-throughs, green areas, the car park, the blocks of flats,

so I thought it'd be really good to get an aerial view.

It can be really valuable to get drone footage of a scene

because it can show you potential routes

that people may have taken in or out of scene,

potential routes for vehicles.

It can also show you where evidence might be.

It gives you that bird's eye view of exactly the scale of the scene

and the proximity of things to each other.

But, frustratingly, this throws up no new evidence.

With the 96-hour custody deadline coming ever closer,

they're still no clearer about what happened on the night.

Despite officers working round the clock,

they still need to find some solid evidence.

The team next dig deeper into materials found in the house search.

We wanted to see if there was anything

that could have been significant to the investigation

in terms of anything to describe their movements,

any firearm paraphernalia.

Searching the house, the CSI found a large quantity

of cash in £50 notes. They found a pepper spray.

We found electronic laser sights

that were quite clearly for a firearm.

We found gun holsters. And it was very evident that

these two had some interest in firearms.

It becomes apparent that the brothers have visited the US

to satisfy their fascination with guns.

And they also found a couple of large Texas shooting targets,

so the kind that you see on TV.

And the target had the name of the firing range in Texas,

and then we got the assistance of the FBI

to help us go and speak to those individuals.

The cars used by the brothers also come under intense scrutiny.

Some inquiries had been going on in the background.

We'd identified a vehicle that was linked to these two brothers.

And finally, the first piece of physical evidence

that could incriminate the younger brother.

We recovered the vehicles,

and we recovered, from one of the vehicles,

a casing from a 0.40-calibre weapon,

which was a real good moment, actually.

That placed it in his vehicle.

The casing had either been discharged from the vehicle

or it had been in a pocket and fallen out. Who knows?

But we were able to attribute that casing

to the younger brother.

Within a few hours before release time,

there could be enough evidence to charge both brothers

with attempted murder.

For me, that was a pivotal moment in our case.

That was a real turning point for us.

And that, for me, was sufficient enough

to then approach the Crown Prosecution Service

for a charging decision.

The brothers are formally remanded in custody.

Both brothers were charged with the attempted murder of the victim,

who was the person who attended Darent Valley Hospital.

SIREN WAILS

However, the victim's refusal to speak to the police

means the team can't prove that he was shot by the brothers

when trying to steal their superbikes.

DSI Moss still needs to find a way

to link the theft and the attempted murder.

There's a tense wait on results from forensics, ballistics,

and also the footage that only the FBI could demand

from the US-based security company.

When we eventually got the footage, what was really helpful was that

it showed their comings and goings.

We could show them leaving the flat

and being outside the flat and near the area of the motorbikes

around about six o'clock in the evening.

The CCTV was positioned to monitor

over £50,000 worth of highly desirable superbikes.

It also showed, before the firearm was discharged,

them both leaving the flat.

GUNSHOTS

And it saw them coming back again.

And it was about two minutes after them coming back into the premises

they'd left, and that's when they went to the London area.

Hundreds of hours of ANPR footage are scoured

to track the movements of the two brothers

to South East London.

We were able to get some CCTV around the area,

and we were able to show timings in terms of the vehicle movements.

In addition to that, we were able to demonstrate that

the younger brother had been to a couple of shops after the incident

but before the return to the scene.

It was very evident that there'd been a change of clothing,

and presumably that would be to avoid detection

in terms of forensic recovery of the use of a firearm.

So, the CCTV really helped

in terms of the sequence of events before and after the shooting.

The trip to London proves significant.

In early April,

Kent major crime team are contacted by the Met.

An unsuspecting member of the public

has found a suspicious object hidden by his car.

One firearm was recovered.

It was in a box that had been placed under the wheel of a random vehicle.

I believe that the two brothers had gone to a location in London

to dispose of the firearm involved.

One of the guns had been hidden under a vehicle,

and then they got rid of their vehicles,

and then they'd both driven back in a different vehicle,

unarmed, and with no weapons to then be found.

DSI Gavin Moss and his team may be closing in,

but without a DNA match between the brothers and the gun,

will it be the breakthrough that they need?

GUNSHOTS

Kent Police special ops, the major crime unit,

are working hard to bring evidence against two brothers

they believe responsible for a street shooting...

..and they might have just had a breakthrough.

The Met Police has secured a pistol

handed to them by a member of the public.

That member of the public was trying to get into the vehicle,

wondered what it was,

opened it, and could see there was what appeared to be a firearm.

It gave the impression that they'd just put it there

under the wheel of a random vehicle.

Why that vehicle was chosen, who knows? But that's what they did.

The Metropolitan Police carry out routine investigations

to see whether the gun has been involved in criminal activity

on their patch.

Subsequently, test firing took place,

and that's where they were able to make a comparison

with the firing of a bullet in the test range

and with incidents involving the use of a 0.40-calibre firearm.

Would the weapon match the casings and bullets found at the scene?

ANDRE HORNE:The National Ballistics Intelligence Service

collects intelligence about

all firearms-related matters

in the country,

be it just recovered items

or shooting incidents.

Through the National Ballistics experts and their database,

we were able to connect the firearm that had been recovered

to this particular incident

as the one that was used by the younger brother.

But where could the brother have bought the gun?

We established that both brothers had travelled to America.

They'd been to a firing range in Texas.

We were able to establish

what they did while they were at that range,

the property that they purchased,

which was the property that had been recovered

from the home address of the younger brother.

So, that all began to really build a picture of

their fascination with firearms.

We were able to show that the calibre-type weapon

that they'd used in America was, in fact,

similar to that that had been used in this particular case.

One more key piece of the jigsaw lands.

We established that a witness had seen,

at the time of the shooting,

the older brother actually walking around the area,

therefore putting him outside of the home address

of the younger brother, which was quite significant, really,

because we could say that he'd been out at that particular time.

And finally, Gavin receives forensic results

for casings found at the crime scene.

So, what we were able to demonstrate was that,

because the casings

had the younger brother's DNA on,

that was likely to have been the weapon

that had been used by the younger brother.

That was hugely significant for us to recover that firearm

that had been used in this particular incident.

The DNA also proves

it was the younger brother who was the stationary shooter

outside the car park.

Andre came to the scene.

He was able to explain the likely position

of the older brother at the time.

This is where you can see the marker

of the two cartridge cases that we found

that we couldn't associate with any impact marks.

But I got the impression that

the victim was trying to escape the parking lot,

and that he'd run up to the top of the parking lot,

but it is fenced in by these hedges.

What we also know is, again, through Andre's assistance,

that he suspected that the older brother was moving

with the firearm while he was discharging it,

which actually was really good evidence for us.

July 2022, the trial for attempted murder

and possession of prohibited firearms starts.

It lasts for five weeks,

and a jury has to get their head around a story

which turns inside out.

It does happen where the person who is perceived

to be the victim turns out to be the offender.

It's not our role to judge.

That's the most important thing here.

That's for us to present the evidence to a court,

and for the jury to be the ones

who decide the fate of the individual concerned.

It's a complex case to prove,

and the police employ some useful tools.

How can I tell this story to a jury?

Drone footage can come in really useful for that,

as can the 360 photography and the walk-through

or the 3-D laser scanning,

cos having a picture or having an aerial view

is so much easier to see and understand

than have someone stand there and try and describe it to you.

The gunshot victim returned to prison

for breaking the terms of his licence.

Appearing in court by video link,

he denies that he was stealing bikes,

but confirms he was shot at the scene.

PC JACK BRAY:I hadn't given evidence in court in person before,

so it was an interesting experience.

I just gave an account

of what my colleagues and I did at the scene,

the decisions that we made, why we made them.

Particularly for such a serious offence,

you just want to make sure you've got everything right.

The most incriminating evidence, I would suggest,

would have been the DNA that was found on the casings,

which identified who had which firearm.

The jury deliberate for two days.

It's always frustrating.

It's tense because you want the right outcome,

you want the right verdict.

And it's just a bit of a nervous time, really,

because you just want to make sure

all your hard work that you've put into an investigation such as this,

you want it to reach the right outcome.

The younger brother was found not guilty of attempted murder,

but was still guilty of possession of a firearm

with intent to endanger life, and sentenced to 14 years.

The elder brother was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment

for the attempted murder of the victim.

The judge laid it out when he considered the sentencing -

he considered the mitigation,

but he also considered the aggravating factor.

And the aggravating factor in this case is somebody being shot

when they shouldn't have been.

GUNSHOTS

And he used his full sentencing powers

to make sure the right sentence was applied.

They're really lengthy sentences

that reflect the seriousness of their crimes.

It's really important for people to see

the sentence that you would get for something like that.

These hefty sentences reflect how seriously

the law takes firearm offences in the UK...

..with a tariff of five years

solely for possession of a non-loaded firearm.

I was actually very happy because I knew that was the right verdict.

The jury had a lot to consider. This was a complex case.

And I'm just delighted to see that

some very dangerous people have been taken off the street.

The level of violence that they showed,

and the level of offending that they've gone to

for something so simple as

someone else trying to steal your bike, is just insane.

I think if you're pointing a gun at somebody and pulling the trigger,

then you're only intending to do one thing, aren't you?

ANDRE HORNE: Whoever discharges that gun

must clearly be aware of the fact that it is capable

of causing injuries that may result in death,

because that's what it was designed for.

This was a really serious offence.

The amount of harm that could have been caused to individuals,

whether innocently or whether they'd been involved

in trying to steal the bikes,

we are really, really lucky that only one person was shot,

and that wasn't a fatal injury.

PC JACK BRAY:This incident just goes to show

how quickly things can change in policing,

and the way that we dealt with it.

And definitely I'll remember this case

for probably the rest of my career.

They've demonstrated that they are violent individuals

prepared to take the law into their own hands

by what they consider to be

the way how to deal with justice,

which is wholly inappropriate, and they have to suffer the penalty.

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