New CCTV: Piran Ditta Khan has been convicted almost 20 years after Pc Sharon Beshenivsky was killed
- last month
The mastermind of an armed robbery that ended in a police officer being shot dead has been found guilty of her murder.
Piran Ditta Khan has been convicted almost 20 years after Pc Sharon Beshenivsky was killed while interrupting a raid at family-run Universal Express travel agents in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in November 2005.
She and her colleague Pc Teresa Milburn, who were both unarmed, were shot at point-blank range by one of the three men who had just carried out the robbery as he emerged from the door of the business.
Almost two decades on, Khan is the last of the seven men involved in the robbery to be convicted.
The 75-year-old flew to Pakistan two months after Pc Beshenivsky’s death and remained at liberty there until he was arrested by Pakistani authorities in January 2020 and then extradited to the UK last year.
Prosecutors said former takeaway boss Khan was the group’s ringleader and, although he did not leave the safety of a lookout car during the raid, played a “pivotal” role in planning it and knew that loaded firearms were to be used.
They told jurors this made him guilty of PC Beshenivsky’s murder “as surely as if he had pulled the trigger on that pistol himself”.
Piran Ditta Khan has been convicted almost 20 years after Pc Sharon Beshenivsky was killed while interrupting a raid at family-run Universal Express travel agents in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in November 2005.
She and her colleague Pc Teresa Milburn, who were both unarmed, were shot at point-blank range by one of the three men who had just carried out the robbery as he emerged from the door of the business.
Almost two decades on, Khan is the last of the seven men involved in the robbery to be convicted.
The 75-year-old flew to Pakistan two months after Pc Beshenivsky’s death and remained at liberty there until he was arrested by Pakistani authorities in January 2020 and then extradited to the UK last year.
Prosecutors said former takeaway boss Khan was the group’s ringleader and, although he did not leave the safety of a lookout car during the raid, played a “pivotal” role in planning it and knew that loaded firearms were to be used.
They told jurors this made him guilty of PC Beshenivsky’s murder “as surely as if he had pulled the trigger on that pistol himself”.