Inside the unit hunting a city’s most wanted outlaws

Crime correspondent Amy-Clare Martin visits the specialist team working to capture Manchester’s high-risk fugitives

- Amy-Clare Martin

As he handed himself in to a Manchester police station, oneeyed killer Dale Cregan told them: You were hounding my family so I took it out on yous. I’m wanted by the police and I’ve just done two coppers.”

The local drug dealer had spent weeks successfully evading capture as police hunted him over the gun and grenade murders of father and son David and Mark Short, whom he had killed in a row between feuding families in east Manchester.

But growing tired of the tactics from Greater Manchester Police, who repeatedly raided his family home and put a £50,000 bounty on his head as they launched the largest manhunt in their history, he decided to hit back and laid a trap.

PC Fiona Bone, 32, and PC Nicola Hughes, 23, were brutally murdered in September 2012 after they responded to a bogus 999 call from Cregan reporting a burglary, who told the handler: "I'll be waiting." He shot the officers multiple times before detonating a fragmentation grenade on the women as they lay on the ground.

He was eventually handed a rare whole life order for murdering the father, son and two policewomen in a case that rocked policing and briefly reignited debate over whether officers should be routinely armed.

GMP’s leaders were also forced to defend the force from criticism for releasing Cregan on bail after he was first arrested for Mark Short’s murder and then adopting the tactic of repeatedly visiting his family while he was on the run.

It was in the wake of this scandal that the Force Critical Wanted Unit (FCWU) was born, with the sole purpose of catching dangerous criminals quickly and effectively.

Now the specialist team, one of only a handful of such units in the country, takes an average of one to three days to catch the city’s most high-risk fugitives by tracking their every movement.