3 men sentenced to over a century in prison after plot to kill a ringleader in UK's biggest heist

Washington Post

25-04-2025

LONDON — Three men who plotted to kill a former cage fighter, who years before had been convicted of being one of the ringleaders in the U.K.'s biggest-ever heist, were sentenced Friday to a collective term of over a century in prison.
The sentencing of the three men at London's Central Criminal Court, which is better known as the Old Bailey, brings to an end a six-year case that had the hallmarks of a movie crime caper.
It involved the metal detector-assisted retrieval of an iPad from the River Thames in the capital, as well as the theft of Ming-era porcelain from a museum in Geneva and even an attempted sale of the treasure in Hong Kong.
Daniel Kelly, 46, and brothers Louis Ahearne, 36, and Stewart Ahearne, 46, were found guilty by a jury last month for conspiracy to murder Paul Allen, then 41, in 2019.
Allen, who was left for dead, was paralyzed from the chest down after being shot at his large home in Woodford Green, northeast London.
Judge Sarah Whitehouse sentenced Kelly to 36 years in prison with an extended license period of five years. Louis Ahearne was sentenced to 36 years in prison while Stewart Ahearne was sentenced to 30 years. They will all serve a minimum of two-thirds of their sentences before being eligible for parole.
The judge said the men were 'motivated by a promise of financial gain' in their agreement to murder Allen.
During the trial, prosecutors alleged that the background to the shooting was the fact that Allen was a 'sophisticated' career criminal. He was convicted in 2009 for his part three years earlier in Britain's biggest armed robbery at a depot in Kent, southeast England, in which 54 million pounds ($72 million at current prices) in cash was stolen, much of which has never been recovered.
Prosecutors said the men had burgled the Museum of Far Eastern Art in Geneva on June 1, 2019, a month before Allen was shot.
Three pieces of Ming-era porcelain were taken from the museum, which had a combined insurance value of around $3.6 million. Investigators also uncovered that the defendants flew to Hong Kong later that month, where they tried to sell one of the items they had stolen — a phoenix bowl — at an auction house.
Jurors heard how elements of that crime echoed with the shooting of Allen, including the use of a Renault Captur hire vehicle.
The case against the three men was given further impetus with the discovery in Nov. 2024 of an iPad in the River Thames that was used to track the movements of Allen before he was shot.
'This attack may look like the plot to a Hollywood blockbuster but the reality is something quite different,' said Detective Superintendent Matt Webb of the Metropolitan Police, who led the investigation. 'This was horrific criminality.'