£54m Securitas robber shot in the neck at home, court told
Paul Allen was paralysed for life after shots were fired at his large detached rented home in Woodford Green, east London, in 2019.
A former cagefighter convicted of Britain’s largest cash robbery was shot in the neck in his kitchen following his release from jail, a court has heard.
Paul Allen, then 41, was paralysed for life after shots were fired at his large detached rented home in Woodford Green, east London, in 2019.
A jury at the Old Bailey was told the intention was to kill him, and the attackers “very nearly succeeded”.
Louis Ahearne, 36, his brother Stewart Ahearne, 46, and Daniel Kelly, 46, are accused of plotting to murder him with others unknown.
Opening their trial on Wednesday, prosecutor Michael Shaw said: “On July 11 2019, just after 11.09pm, gunshots were fired from a self-loading Glock 9mm handgun.
“They were fired at a man called Paul Allen as he stood in the kitchen at the back of a large detached house in Malvern Drive in Woodford, east London.
“The intention of the men who planned and carried out that shooting of Paul Allen on July 11 was to kill him – you will have no doubt about that when you see the evidence in this case.
“They very nearly succeeded. At least six bullets were fired at him from that Glock handgun, two of which struck him.
“One hit him in the centre of the throat and left him paralysed for life.
“It was only the rapid intervention of neighbours, police officers, paramedics, and then the skill of surgeons who were able to remove the bullet lodged in his spine, that saved his life.”
Mr Shaw added: “Three of the men who planned and carried out that attack are in the dock of this Crown Court today.”
The gunshots that night were heard “pretty much all over Woodford” and police received a number of emergency calls, jurors heard.
Mr Allen’s next-door neighbours heard the loud bangs and the victim’s partner, Jade Bovingdon, screaming: “He’s been shot. He’s been shot.”
They dashed over and found Ms Bovingdon screaming for an ambulance and Mr Allen slumped in the hallway with a towel pressed to his neck and struggling to breathe.
His little finger had been “virtually amputated” by one of the bullets, Mr Shaw said.
A private security guard provided first aid and armed police took over before paramedics arrived, the court was told.
Other neighbours saw between one and three figures running away and getting into the “mission car” – a hired Renault Captur – that made off at speed.
Jurors heard that scenes of crime officers were deployed to the property soon after the shooting and recovered five shell casings close to a summer house.
Swabs were taken from a nearby fence panel and DNA was matched to Kelly and Louis Ahearne, jurors were told.
Mr Shaw added: “The reason they hit him in the throat was they had a particularly effective sight fitted to the Glock, the sort of sight found at Daniel Kelly’s address one month later.”
The prosecutor said the background to the shooting was that Mr Allen is a career criminal and “a very sophisticated criminal at that”.
He told jurors: “He was convicted a number of years ago at Woolwich Crown Court for his part in what was then – and still is – Britain’s biggest armed robbery, at Securitas Express in Kent, in which £54 million in cash was stolen, much of which is outstanding.
“By 2019, he had been released from prison and moved from south London to a large detached property in Woodford, north-east London, where he lived with his partner and young children.”
The defendants travelled from their home turf in the Woolwich area of south-east London, through the Blackwall Tunnel to the victim’s new home in Malvern Drive as part of the planning and execution of the conspiracy, jurors were told.
Mr Shaw told the jury they were “not going on a picnic” as they scouted the scene around the address, including on the morning of the shooting.
As part of the sophisticated planning of the attack, unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile phones were used to communicate and vehicles hired, the court heard.
The Renault Captur was hired by Stewart Ahearne from a dealership in Dartford and used by the other two defendants in a burglary on a gated community in Kent the day before the shooting, it was alleged.
Jurors heard that CCTV cameras on a house next to the scene of the shooting captured “significant” events that night as well as Kelly allegedly carrying out reconnaissance in a Mercedes car on the previous morning and on earlier dates.
On the night of the shooting, Mr Allen had arrived home in a white Ford Fiesta but went out again in his other car, a Mercedes, which had allegedly delayed the attack plan.
Mr Shaw told jurors that the defendants had fitted the Mercedes with a tracking device, enabling them to follow it.
Louis Ahearne, from Greenwich, south-east London, and Stewart Ahearne and Kelly, both of no fixed address, have denied conspiring to murder Mr Allen between June 26 and July 12 2019.
