Heart-stopping moment cop saves BMW driver's life as he tries to run across motorway after terrifying 160mph chase
Terrifying footage shows the man attempting to flee the scene after a 160mph chase down the M1 and M69.
4
4
Police dashcam reveals Patrick Connors, 45, barrelling down the major motorways in a BMW 5 Series.
"That was scary as ****," one officer can be heard saying the their vehicle.
Connors speeds through a red light and hurtles down the hard shoulder, reaching 130pmh.
The thug tries to brake check to throw cops off his tracks and swerves across lanes to ditch them.
But he decides to stop in the fast lane and flee on foot towards the central barrier.
A police officer pleads with him and shouts: "Don't go across the carriageway, you'll get killed.
"Don't do it buddy. Don't do it."
He manages to grab onto Connor's T-shirt and restrain him on the ground in handcuffs.
Connors, of Queensferry, Wales, later admitted dangerous driving and failing to stop.
He also admitting acquiring criminal property, dangerous driving and driving while disqualified.
Moment 'worst driver ever seen' sends TWO cars flying in horror 100mph crash during police chase
The court heard he had used 17 fake identities while lying to officers.
The yob was was jailed at Mold Crown Court this week for three years and banned from driving for five years.
This comes after another dramatic chase was caught on camera when perused a disqualified driver who was racing at speeds of up to 80mph.
Charley Lance, 24, led police on a dangerous high speed chase through the town of Harwich, Essex, before being pinned down by PC Johnny Lee.
Incredible footage shows police in hot pursuit of Lance as he races through the town at around 4.45pm on November 13, 2024.
Elsewhere, the moment a drug dealer raced ahead of cops in a high-speed chase before being cornered by officers was captured on bodycam footage.
Connor Darwent, 27, led police on a terrifying five-mile pursuit after speeding away from officers and making his way across a historic country estate.
The drug dealer had been stopped while driving on the A46 towards Lincoln in his powerful BMW 1 Series by cops as he was wanted on suspicion of supplying class A drugs.
Police body camera footage shows the dramatic moment Darwent sped away from the police block, prompting other cops to chase after him.
Despite having his tyres shredded by a police stinger, Darwent reached blistering speeds racing his BMW down the main road.
Following the incredible police chase on May 24, 2022, Darwent admitted conspiracy to supply class A drugs and dangerous driving.
He was jailed for two-and-a-half years on Thursday, June 5.
4
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
a minute ago
- Daily Mail
Police used 'Orwellian' powers to 'gag' firefighter who was arrested after criticising his bosses online
Police used 'Orwellian' powers to 'gag' a firefighter who was arrested after criticising his bosses online, it has been claimed. Robert Moss was allegedly told by Staffordshire Police that his right to 'freedom of expression' must be 'limited to maintain public safety and order' after he was arrested on suspicion of malicious communications on July 8. Prior to his dismissal in 2021, the former firefighter, 56, had served Staffordshire fire and rescue service for 28 years and even worked as the county's Fire Brigade Union's secretary. An employment tribunal in 2023 later found that he had been wrongly dismissed from his position, with a judgement ruling it had been an 'unfair' decision. Following this, in a private Facebook group, the father-of-one had provided advice to firefighters, alongside making several critical comments regarding the fire service's management. At a bail hearing held at Newcastle-Under-Lyme magistrates' court, the police's 'gagging clause' was eventually overturned due to concerns about the draconian approach by officers. While Mr Moss was never charged with a crime, his home was raided at 7am in July, with officers seizing two telephones, an iPad and a computer. He was then given bail with six conditions that included being prohibited from posting any communication relating to the county's fire service, alongside anything related to the ongoing investigation. Mr Moss was also prohibited from contacting the fire chief officer, Rob Barber, and his deputy, Glynn Luznyj. Now, the former firefighter has criticised Staffordshire Police's decision to arrest him, telling the Telegraph that the online messages were 'certainly not criminal' but, rather, 'anodyne'. Mr Moss went on to accuse the fire service of 'weaponising the police' in a bid to 'silence' him, adding that the 'gagging' order represented a human rights breach. During the magistrates' court hearing, Tom Beardsworth, a barrister hired by the Free Speech Union, said that two of Mr Moss' bail conditions represented a 'deep threat to the right of free expression'. He added: 'For the police to prohibit an arrested person from speaking about their arrest is extraordinary and Orwellian, and it is not hyperbole to put it in those terms. 'We do not live in a police state and Mr Moss should have every right to speak about his arrest.' However, arresting officer DC Isobel Holliday said that the bail conditions had been 'proportionate' given the 'malicious and reckless' online posts by Mr Moss. Following the evidence, Paul Tabinor, chairman of the magistrates' bench, ruled that while Mr Moss would be permitted to post messages about the fire service, he was no longer banned from posting about the police investigation. Sam Armstrong, the FSU's legislative affairs director, described Mr Moss' case as 'amongst the most egregious abuses of state power' the organisation had come across. A spokesperson for Staffordshire Police said: 'We arrested a 56-year-old man, from Newcastle-under-Lyme, on Tuesday 8 July, on suspicion of harassment without violence, sending communication/article of an indecent/offensive nature and knowingly/recklessly obtain or disable personal data without consent of the controller. 'The man has been released on conditional bail as our enquiries continue.' Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service said it would be inappropriate to comment during the active proceedings. Mr Moss' dismissal is believed to be the latest in a string of heavy-handed police responses over 'thought crimes', with writers, councillors and parents talking in school WhatsApp groups targeted in recent months. Just last week, Ring doorbell footage emerged of an embarrased police officer reluctantly knocking on a suspected 'anti-migrant' protester's door amid an increasing backlash over the scourge of 'thought police'. Doorbell footage shows two West Midland Police officers approaching the property in Coventry to give the homeowner a leaflet ahead of a planned anti-immigration demonstration. But one of the officers is hesitant to carry out the task and admits his visit is 'woeful' and a 'load of 'b******'. Speaking into a ring doorbell, the police officer tells the homeowner: 'Warwickshire have asked me to come round. 'It's a load of b******* but it's about this protest tomorrow in Warwickshire. They're aware that you might be wanting to attend that planned protest. 'And obviously that's absolutely fine. You've got a freedom of speech and there are no issues at all. A spokesperson for West Midlands Police told the Daily Mail: 'We're aware of footage circulating on social media showing an officer visiting a property. 'The footage is being reviewed and we are speaking to the officer in relation to the circumstances. 'This visit was part of the work our officers have been doing to support Warwickshire Police in their engagement and preparations for a planned protest in Warwickshire this weekend.' Meanwhile, in November 2023, a a retired policeman was arrested and handcuffed in his own home in May by six police officers armed with batons and pepper spray. Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham, was detained by Kent Police cops - the very same force he had given around ten years of his life to - after he questioned a supporter of pro-Palestine demonstrations on X (formerly Twitter). Bodycam footage of the incident in November 2023, shows officers describing the 71-year-old's books and literature scattered around his home as 'very Brexity things', according to The Telegraph. Police also raised worries over a shopping list, written by the retired man's hairdresser wife, which included items such as bleach, tin foil and gloves, whilst they seized Mr Foulkes electronic devices from his home. They also searched through most of his personal items, including newspaper clippings from the funeral as well as the police probe of his daughter, Francesca's death, who had been killed by a drunk driver whilst holidaying in Ibiza 15 years ago. A police officer was heard stating, according to the publication: 'Ah. That's sad,' as she continued to rummage through the retired special constable's items, before he was put in a police cell for eight hours. After hours of interrogation on suspicion of malicious communication, Mr Foulkes accepted a warning as he worried it could affect any future visits to see his daughter who resides in Australia. 'My life wouldn't be worth living if I couldn't see her. At the time, I believed a caution wouldn't affect travel, but a conviction definitely would,' he said. Kent Police later confessed the decision to give Mr Foulkes a caution was a mistake and have wiped it off the 76-year-old's record. Mr Foulkes has since aired his concerns in what he believes to be an attack on freedom of speech, quipping: 'I saw Starmer in the White House telling Trump we've had it in the UK for a very long time, and I thought, 'Yeah, right.' We can see what's really going on.' The 76-year-old's ordeal started when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, which saw 1,200 people killed and over 250 taken hostage. An incident which sparked several pro-Palestine marches in London. The retired policeman had been told by his Jewish friends about how they felt unsafe travelling to the bustling city. Later that October, he had become increasingly worried having reports of mobs storming an airport in Dagestan, Russia to intercept Israeli citizens. So, the next day when he saw a post from an account called Mr Ethical, which read: 'Dear @SuellaBraverman – as someone who was on one of the 'hate marches', if you call me an antisemite I will sue you,' he felt inclined to respond. He responded to the tweet saying: 'One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals…' He claimed he had never been in contact with the account prior, and was warning of possible escalation with the on-going pro-Palestinian protests.
Telegraph
16 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Now we have proof free speech is a joke in two-tier Britain
After Labour councillor Ricky Jones stood at a demonstration in Walthamstow decrying 'disgusting Nazi fascists' and telling a crowd through a microphone that 'we need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all', a jury of Mr Jones's peers cleared him of any offence. When Lucy Connolly – married to a Tory councillor – posted on social media 'set fire to all the f-----g hotels full of all the b------s for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it', she chose to plead guilty under apparent pressure from the state. Ms Connolly is currently serving a 31-month prison sentence, at times on a 23-hour lockdown confined to her cell with no privileges, for her ill-tempered words. Others, who stood their ground, walked free. The results were still unpleasant – the process is in part the punishment – but better than they might otherwise have been. It is hard not to feel that the difference between the two cases is less a matter of law than politics. Lucy Connolly was denied bail as Sir Keir Starmer and the judiciary worked on their 'shared understanding' that anyone expressing sentiments that could have encouraged last year's riots needed to be made an example of. Sir Keir himself told the nation that individuals would be held on remand. The Home Office openly risked prejudicing trials by labelling those arrested, charged but not yet convicted as 'criminals'. If there's a lesson here, it may well be that people can say stupid things without the world collapsing around them. And that the public – which did not visibly respond to either exhortation – can be trusted, for the most part, to recognise the distinction between genuinely threatening language and idiocy, both on the streets and in jury deliberations. Unlike our American cousins, British people have only a very qualified right to free speech. While the human rights system appears to go out of its way to undermine attempts to control borders or crack down on crime, protection of speech is heavily caveated. And the British state makes full use of these carve-outs in its attempt to maintain its fragile grip on the country it has built. Its most important aim is to prevent tensions between groups. Speech that might inflame them is subject to stringent oversight and exacting scrutiny by officials terrified of what might spiral out from a frank examination of the country as it is. People on the Left, however, can speak with relative security. The result, in the words of Reform's Zia Yusuf, appears to be 'a country in which those who have the correct 'regime' political views can openly call for their political opponents to be brutally murdered, be filmed doing so, and face no criminal consequences'.
Times
30 minutes ago
- Times
Barrister fighting for Lucy Letby: She's feeling new hope
When Mark McDonald answered the phone, almost exactly a year ago, he had no idea he was about to step into the heart of one of the most high-profile cases in British legal history. The call was from Lucy Letby's parents and they wanted his help. 'A week later, I'm meeting Lucy,' McDonald recalls. Letby's family wanted him to take over from her previous lawyer, Ben Myers, and free her from prison, where she is serving 15 whole-life terms. At the end of her ten-month trial in 2023 (one of the longest in British legal history) she was convicted of seven counts of murder and six of attempted murder at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Cheshire between 2015 and 2016. A further trial last year added one more conviction on a count of attempted murder. McDonald was Letby's last hope. 'I get the phone call when it's all gone wrong,' says McDonald, 59, a seasoned criminal defence barrister with a reputation for high-profile appeals. McDonald is in Devon on a family holiday, so we speak over Zoom. His two children, aged three and four, have spent all day building sandcastles and eating ice cream. But work never stops when it comes to McDonald's most high-profile client. McDonald speaks to Letby, 35, once a week or every two weeks — sometimes more often — and visits her once a month at Bronzefield prison in Ashford, Surrey. He says Letby is 'in a very different place today than what she was 12 months ago'. 'Remember, 12 months ago, she'd lost every argument. She had been saying that she was not guilty right from the beginning and nobody believed her. She went through a whole trial and she was convicted. She went to the Court of Appeal and she was convicted. She had a retrial; she was convicted. She went to the Court of Appeal again; she was convicted. And that was it. There, you have a broken person. But today, after everything that has happened in the last 12 months, she's got new hope.' At least some of that is thanks to McDonald. Back in 2023, under photos of her dead-eyed mugshot Letby was universally branded the blonde-haired, blue-eyed 'angel of death' who was 'evil' and 'a monster'. Slowly at first and then all at once, the public debate over the veracity of her conviction became more heated. In the past 12 months McDonald has done everything he can to transform what was initially a tiny ripple of outlier conspiracy theorists decrying the nurse's guilt into overt support ranging from celebrities and newspaper columnists to scientists and some MPs. But he still has a way to go. For Letby to be allowed to appeal against her conviction, McDonald must first submit 'new evidence' to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), an independent public body that assesses potential miscarriages of justice. To this end he has assembled a 14-strong independent panel of international neonatal and paediatric experts with whom he shared the babies' medical notes. In February, McDonald called a press conference in which they cast a shadow of doubt upon the prosecution's expert medical case. It caused a media storm. McDonald and his panel claimed to have assembled evidence to refute the sky-high insulin levels found in some of the babies ('the [insulin] test was not fit to be used as forensic evidence,' he says); the rota showing Letby was on duty (he says it 'doesn't stack up with statisticians'); and highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony of Dr Ravi Jayaram, who had claimed during the trial to have seen Letby standing over a baby with a dislodged breathing tube. The parents of some of the victims say McDonald's 'publicity stunt' is 'distressing' and that they 'already have the truth'. A BBC Panorama documentary last week raised concerns about McDonald's case. The documentary suggested there was a lack of consensus among the experts. In the case of Baby O, one expert, Dr Richard Taylor, claimed in a December 2024 press conference that the baby's liver was pierced with a needle by another doctor. However, another expert on the panel, Professor Neena Modi, claims the baby's liver injuries may have been caused by a traumatic birth. The Thirlwall public inquiry was told Baby O was delivered by caesarean section and their medical records had no reference to any difficulties or trauma. A defiant McDonald says the most recent documentary, by Judith Moritz and Jonathan Coffey, was 'a shambles' and he 'felt that much of it was wrong, misquoted' and 'poorly put together'. Moritz was one of the few reporters given access to the whole Letby trial at Manchester crown court and The Times's review called the documentary 'impressive' and 'a rigorous look at the evidence'. However, what the panel do agree on is that Lucy Letby is innocent. Heading the panel is the Canadian neonatologist Dr Shoo Lee, whose research paper on air embolisms in babies was referenced at Letby's trial. He says his research was misinterpreted and should never have been used. But the Court of Appeal dismissed his argument as 'irrelevant and inadmissible' because the babies had never been diagnosed like he claimed. McDonald takes issue with the prosecution using the medical expert Dewi Evans — an expert paediatrician and former clinical director for paediatrics and neonatology — who he says 'has been retired for 14 years and wasn't even a neonatologist' — to convict Letby, but hasn't he done the same, cherry-picking his medical experts to counter Evans's opinion? Many of the experts on his panel asked to see the medical notes under the condition that they could say publicly if they thought Letby was guilty, but all were in concurrence — no crime had been committed; Letby was innocent. Were there any experts who received the babies' medical notes and were not prepared to join the panel? 'No,' McDonald says. He is also backed by the MP Sir David Davis and the former health secretary Sir Jeremy Hunt, who has said her case must be 'urgently re-examined'. McDonald is so certain 'no crime has been committed' that he is working for nothing. Although he has other (paid) work, he estimates he has spent thousands of hours on Letby's case. 'I can't tell you, every day I work on it,' he says. 'I'm on holiday in Devon and I'm working on it. I had a telephone conference with Lucy yesterday. I won't stop. I will not stop until she is out.' McDonald says he can relate to the pressure of working in a hospital — it's where he started. He grew up in Birmingham and left school with no qualifications, becoming a general porter in a hospital aged 16, before becoming a plaster of Paris technician a couple of years later. Then he moved to the operating theatre as an assistant, and went to night school to study for A-levels that would lead him to study law at the University of Westminster. 'While I was at university studying law I continued to work all the time in the operating theatre. The last day of me working in the operating theatre was the day before my pupillage started as a barrister.' He has worked with 'many intensive care nurses in my time' and 'assisted in operating on neonates, paediatrics and intubation — the whole lot'. McDonald says he would have liked to have been Letby's lawyer from the start, and that 'I knew when she was arrested, I could write how this case would play out because I'd seen it before. I knew what was going to happen.' Letby is not the first killer nurse McDonald has represented. He has launched appeals for Ben Geen, who in 2003 and 2004 was convicted of murdering two patients and committing grievous bodily harm against another 15 after he was found to be administering drugs so he could resuscitate the patients at Horton General Hospital in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Geen's appeals have failed. I ask McDonald if he tends to see the best in people. 'Oh yeah,' he says as he runs a hand through his hair. 'I'm not naive; I'm a criminal defence barrister — I've represented many people over the years who are guilty. But I'm also able to see very clearly where this has gone wrong. There's no forensic evidence. There's no CCTV. There's no eyewitness evidence. There's just a theory by a man called Dewi Evans.' The barrister's approach is not for everyone. McDonald doesn't deny he is a publicity seeker. He says when it comes to changing the public narrative in cases of miscarriages of justice, boosting the media profile is 'very important'. He says in such cases cases it is often 'important to win the public narrative' before winning 'the legal narrative, because the Court of Appeal will know that the country is going to be looking at them'. McDonald says when, not if, Letby's case goes back to the Court of Appeal, 'they're going to have to take notice of what's being said'. Although McDonald is a master of public relations, he can be prone to exaggeration. 'If there was a poll tomorrow — obviously I haven't done a poll — but I would say that 50 per cent of the country would say that she needs to have a retrial because something's gone wrong, 40 per cent would say she's innocent and 10 per cent would say that we think she's guilty. I think it's that high.' He says his family and friends have been supportive of his work with Letby, 'because, look, I'm right!' He catches himself, 'God, that sounds very arrogant, I don't mean it to, but I am. And that's not because I say I am, but because every international expert that's looked at this says I'm right.' There is no time frame by which the CCRC must decide on whether to refer the case but McDonald expects it to be around the new year. He says in his 26 years of being a barrister he has never submitted so much evidence to the CCRC and that 'there'd be public outrage' if it is not referred. He says: 'If this is not referred back to the Court of Appeal then one has to question the purpose of the CCRC.' He says there is 'no plan B'. McDonald plans to do more paperwork on the case on holiday. He is talking to Letby again on Monday. What's driving him, he says, is that 'there's an innocent woman in prison that's been sentenced to the rest of her life to die in prison. And potentially I can get her out. It's not 'why am I doing it?' but 'why wouldn't I do it?''
