London (AP) – Three men who plotted to kill a cage vertery, who previously had been sentenced to be one of the leaders of the UK's largest burglary, were sentenced to a collective mandate of more than a century in prison on Friday.
The conviction of the three men of the London Central Criminal Court, better known as Old Bailey, ends a six -year affair which had the characteristics of a cinematographic crime.
He involved the recovery assisted by a metal detector of an iPad from the river Thames in the capital, as well as the porcelain flight of the Ming era of a Museum in Geneva and even an attempt to sell the Treasury in Hong Kong.
Daniel Kelly, 46, and the Louis Ahearne brothers, 36, and Stewart Ahearne, 46, were found guilty by a jury last month for a plot to assassinate Paul Allen, then 41, in 2019.
Allen, who was left for dead, was paralyzed from the trunk after being killed in his large house in Woodford Green, northeast of London.
Judge Sarah Whitehouse sentenced Kelly to 36 years in prison with a prolonged five -year permit period. Louis Ahearne was sentenced to 36 years in prison while Stewart Ahearne was sentenced to 30 years. They will all serve a minimum of two thirds of their sentences before being eligible for parole.
The judge said the men were “motivated by a promise of financial gain” in their agreement to murder Allen.
During the trial, the prosecutors alleged that the context of the shooting was the fact that Allen was a “sophisticated” career criminal. He was sentenced in 2009 for his part three years earlier in the largest armed robbery in Great Britain in a deposit in Kent, in the south-east of England, during which 54 million pounds ($ 72 million at current prices) were stolen, a large part of which was never recovered.
The prosecutors said that men had robbed the Extreme Oriental Art Museum in Geneva on June 1, 2019, a month before Allen was shot.
Three pieces of porcelain from the Ming era were taken from the museum, which had a combined insurance value of approximately $ 3.6 million. Investigators also discovered that the defendants flew to Hong Kong later this month, where they tried to sell one of the items they stolen – a Phoenix Bowl – in an auction house.
The jurors heard how elements of this crime resonated with the Allen shooting, including the use of a rental vehicle from Captur Renault.
The case against the three men was even more proven by the discovery in November 2024 of an iPad in the Thames which was used to follow the movements of Allen before it was shot.
“This attack can look like the intrigue of a Hollywood blockbuster, but reality is something very different,” said Superintendent Detective Matt Web of the metropolitan police, who conducted the investigation. “It was horrible crime.”
