Six gang members were jailed for between 12 and 30 years yesterday for their roles in an armed ambush of police, said by a judge to be the most serious incident of last summer’s riots.
The men were part of a group of more than 40 rioters armed with guns and petrol bombs who started a disturbance in Newtown, Birmingham, intended to lure in police.
The gang set fire to a pub, the Bartons Arms, while staff were inside, and blockaded the road. As the violence raged on August 9 last year, shots were fired at officers, at marked police vehicles and at the West Midlands Police helicopter hovering overhead.
Ballistics experts believe that at least a dozen shots were fired from four or more handguns, some narrowly missing officers. Night-vision cameras on the helicopter captured the image of a man aiming a handgun at the aircraft almost directly over his head.
Judge William Davis, QC, told Birmingham Crown Court that had the helicopter been hit, the consequences would have been catastrophic.
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“It may well be that more than four guns were used,” he said. “At least 12 shots were fired. It is pure good fortune that no police officer was hit. ”
The men jailed were part of a group of hooded and masked rioters involved in arson and missile-throwing. The judge said many may never be caught because of “the poor quality of the available CCTV footage”.
Jailing the men found guilty at the end of a six-week trial, the judge said they had committed a grave offence. He added: “This was planned violence carried out at a time of major public disorder and with the purpose of luring police officers to the scene so that they might be attacked.”
The judge said that cases related to the August riots had attracted severe sentences that had been upheld by the Court of Appeal. However, none of the cases considered by the higher court “even begins to approach in seriousness the offences of which these defendants have been convicted”, he said.
Tyrone Laidley, 20, who shot at the helicopter and helped to plan the riot, was jailed for 23 years. Wayne Collins, 25, who travelled from Luton to Birmingham and stayed in the city to take part in the attack on police, was sentenced to 18 years. Renardo Farrell, involved in the attack on the Barton Arms, also received an 18-year term.
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An order prohibiting the naming of Amirul Rahman, who was 16 at the time of the riot, was lifted as he was sentenced to 12 years’ detention. The judge said that Rahman was part of a group that had “pretensions to be part of gang culture”.
Nicholas Francis, 25, who was armed, was jailed for 30 years as the judge described him as a dangerous man and an active member of the Raiders, a West Bromwich street gang. Another Raiders member, Jermaine Lewis, 27, who drove Francis and Collins to the scene in a hijacked car, was sentenced to 23 years.
Detectives studied more than 300 hours of closed-circuit television footage, interviewed numerous witnesses and gathered evidence from mobile phones to bring the case to court.
Assistant Chief Constable Gareth Cann, of West Midlands Police, said: “This could easily have been a murder inquiry: officers came close to being shot and, in a worse case scenario, the helicopter could have been brought down.”
Detective Inspector Andy Bannister, who led the investigation into the disturbances said: “The defendants showed wanton disregard for life; they’d already set fire to a pub with residents inside before discharging firearms into a busy road where police officers were standing.”