'When I heard my brother was dead I crawled under my desk and wailed...'

THE DAY his twin brother took his own life will forever be seared into the memory of Darren Rathband.

- By James Rampton

LIFE-CHANGING INJURIES: Darren with David. Right, blind David in uniform

"I was at work," he says. "I remember I had two files in my hand and my phone went. A supervisor came on the line and said, 'Darren, I'm sorry to tell you, David's hung himself. He's dead'.

"So that was that. I dropped the files on the floor and then wailed in an office with about 15 people. Wailed like a baby and crawled under a desk.

"I remember that quite vividly, actually. I just wailed. Wailed."

This was on February 29, 2012, and 18 months earlier David, then a police officer, had been sitting in his patrol car on a bridge over the A1 in Newcastle when he was shot twice with a sawn-off shotgun and permanently blinded by vicious killer

'I broke down realising he had lost his sight'

Raoul Moat. Danger man Moat had been on the run and was the target of a massive manhunt across the North East.

After being released from Durham Prison, he had seriously injured his former girlfriend Samantha Stobbart and killed her new partner Chris Brown.

Haunted by traumatic memories of the attack, unable to come to terms with his blindness and in continual agony because of the hundreds of pieces of shrapnel still lodged in his face, David was driven to kill himself at the age of 44.

Moat's case grabbed headlines around the world. While on the run, he had sent a disturbing 49-page letter to the police, blaming them for all his woes and announcing that he was waging war against them.

The manhunt went on for almost a week. It was the biggest in modern British history, encompassing 160 armed officers, many brought in from other forces.