Gang who squirted sauce on victims to distract them as they stole thousands are jailed after months-long theft spree
The five gang members used distraction techniques including squirting mustard and ketchup onto the coats of their elderly victims, who had just taken cash out of the bank, whilst another gang member robbed them.
Between October 2024 and February 2025, the five offenders observed the victims collecting large amounts of money from branches in Kent, including Chatham, Dartford, Gravesend and Sevenoaks.
They then followed their victims, who were in their 60s, 70s and 80s, back to where their cars were parked. The criminals then engaged the victims in conversation while accomplices stole the cash.
Other methods used to distract the victims included placing nails and pins on the floor to either cause a puncture or encourage the victim to get out and remove the potential hazard.
They also squirted sauce or mustard from a bottle onto the victim's coat and then pointed out the stain to cause a distraction.
On each occasion, the victims, who were in their 60s, 70s and 80s, were engaged in talking sufficiently for another accomplice to gain access to the cash inside a car or bag and steal it undetected.
A police investigation led to the tracking of a vehicle involved in the thefts back to Hemel Hempstead, where the gang members were later arrested.
Jhon Ruiz, Maria Carmen, Solomon Rondon, Miguel Perez and Matias Vega, all of no fixed address, were later charged with conspiracy to steal.
Further investigations following their arrest found the thieves had also targeted victims in Berkshire and Essex. In total, the gang stole £20,720 and attempted to steal a further £10,085.
All five pleaded guilty to the indictment and were sentenced at Maidstone Crown Court on Friday 7 August.
Perez, 31, was imprisoned for three years and nine months and Carmen, 48, was sentenced to three years and four months in prison.
Ruiz, 40, Rondon, 49 and Vega, 32, were all jailed for two years and seven months.
Investigating officer, Detective Constable Emma Laimbeer, said: 'These heartless criminals targeted victims who could not afford to lose the large amounts of cash that were stolen.
'Their targets were people whose first instinct was to trust strangers who engaged them in conversation. The victims' good natures were then exploited by an organised gang who used a variety of distraction techniques to get access to their money.
'Our detectives were absolutely determined to track down these offenders and successfully identified their car through painstaking examination of CCTV.
'Once identified, investigators worked out the most likely location to intercept the thieves and travelled out of Kent to effect the arrests.'
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The Sun
7 minutes ago
- The Sun
I snared evil ‘Manson-like' landlord who sealed tenant in concrete tomb after warped ‘disciples' lured him to his death
WHEN trusting Christophe Borgye took delivery of a cement mixer, on behalf of his landlord, he was effectively signing his own death warrant. The cement would later be used to encase Christophe's body in a concrete tomb in the shed of his garden - after his evil landlord and two housemates lured him to a 'kill room' they'd secretly set up in his kitchen. 12 12 They then beat the flight attendant with hammers and stabbed him with knives at his rented terraced home in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, before hiding his bound-up body in the makeshift tomb. His body may have been left there to this day – unbeknown to the unsuspecting neighbours and the house's new occupants - if it weren't for an extraordinary confession and painstaking police work that helped convict the three twisted perpetrators Dominik Kocher, Sebastian Bendou and Manuel Wagner. The complex case, which spanned over nine years, is laid bare for the first time in new documentary Murder in Concrete. The case began to unravel in April 2013, four years after Christophe was reported missing, when one of the murderers, Bendou, travelled from Dumfries in Scotland back to Ellesmere Port and called police in a confused state confessing to the crime in broken English and French. Anton Sullivan, now a retired inspector, was on duty that day at another station but was called in to help as he was known to be fluent in French. 'Bendou looked very dishevelled, very confused,' Anton told The Sun. 'I introduced myself and I said 'Right, tell me in French'. He was quite relieved that I spoke French and started telling me he'd been involved in killing someone and hiding the body. 'Initially he didn't give a lot of detail, he gave a name, a place and a time. 'Looking at the state of him, how he presented and the fact he was confused, of course I had my doubts. Later on it was established he had mental health problems, so it could have been quite easy to dismiss. 'But I did think, let's just check to see if there's any veracity to any of the comments he's making. Why I want to meet my monster dad Ian Huntley 'I just felt there was something in what he was telling me, call it a gut feeling or a sixth sense.' Colleagues ran checks and found Bendou's story correlated with the disappearance of Ryanair flight attendant Christophe, who had been reported missing by a colleague on May 2009. 'I wrote in my pocketbook, in French, a record of the conversation I'd had with him then, as is standard practice, I gave him the book and I said, 'Can you just sign here to confirm that this is what you said?' 'At that point he read it and he said, 'I'm not signing anything until my solicitor gets here'. He said that with a calm and detached air about him and I thought, 'There is something to this now'.' The case was passed over to Detective Steve Curry on the murder team, who told The Sun: 'I've got to be honest, when the logs hit our office the next morning and we spoke to Anton, we thought, 'Really?' 'When you're on a murder squad you rarely get someone banging on your door saying, 'Can I show you where I've buried a body?'' 12 12 Nevertheless Steve headed straight out to the two addresses on the same street in Ellesmere Port – and was horrified by what he found. 'The first address didn't look like the kind of place a body could be buried," said Steve. 'So I headed to the second and they had a brick built shed at the bottom of the garden, I went into the neighbour's gardens and looked at their sheds, then back to that one and it was clear there was a hand built brick-made 'structure' inside the shed. It didn't fit with the rest of the street. 'We brought Bendou down and, handcuffed to a cop, he went straight to the shed and pointed it out. 'Then we started the three and a half day excavation of Christophe's body from there. 'It was really eerie. Even before we started digging, we brought in experts, forensic archaeologists and entomologists, experts in cement, experts in brick. We don't really 100 per cent know if he was still alive when they dumped them in there. Retired detective Steve Curry 'It was a baking hot day in spring and when we first cracked open the concrete, the first thing that got you was the smell because he'd been airtight for all those years. 'The cement had set in around him, so it was a personal tomb around him. 'Clearly what they'd done is built a box with bricks then after attacking him, they'd wrapped him up in his quilt - he was still in his football shirt, jogging bottoms and flip flops. They put a pillow in there and threw their murder weapons in – knives and a hammer. 'Then they tied him into a big ball with bungee cords and dropped him into this tomb and just poured cement over the top, skimmed it off and left him in there. 'I mean, it must have been horrific. We don't really 100 per cent know if he was still alive when they dumped them in there. 'We wanted to X-ray the bundle as a whole unit. So Christophe was transported to the Royal Liverpool Hospital and, lo and behold, you could see the full form of a human, along with the knife and the hammer and everything they had thrown in there, on the X-ray.' Tracing family Anton was then asked to use his French skills to track down victim Christophe's family in France, who at the time – thanks to a forged email by Kocher – believed he had gone travelling to China with a girl he met. Using his knowledge of France he eventually managed to contact police in the village the family had moved to, and spoke to Christophe's dad Yves, a former police officer in Paris who incidentally had been one of the officers at the scene of Princess Diana's car crash. 'Of course it was a difficult conversation to have, I didn't know Yves very well then, but he was very matter of fact. He was recently retired police officer, he'd done 30 years as a cop in Paris, so although the news was devastating, because of his professionalism, he kept calm. I explained what information we had. 12 12 'At this point we haven't confirmed this was Christophe, so we had to start the process of getting a formal identification, which again proved a challenge because there were no dental records, there were no medical records, we had no DNA, there was no crime scene at that stage that had usable DNA. 'The offenders had systematically erased every aspect of his life, including his physical belongings, so we had nothing to go on.' Eventually Christophe's family members came over to the UK and used their DNA to confirm the body was his. As the police investigation unfolded, more sordid details of his murder emerged. Horror kill room The calculated killers had built a kill-room in the kitchen, covering all the sides with plastic and tarpaulin under the pretext they were deep cleaning, then lured Christophe downstairs to help. Once defenceless Christophe was down on his knees cleaning, they rained hammer blows down on him followed by knife wounds. 'The attack was absolutely brutal and then they've bagged him up and wrapped him up like a big ball of rubbish. And they clearly already had this tomb built,' Steve said. 'They've bought the knives with a load of shampoo and stuff to clean themselves up after the attack. This is all very, very calculated and pre-meditated.' Through house to house enquiries, police began to unravel the strange dynamic between Kocher - the ringleader, who lived on one side of the road with his family - and the other perpetrators Bendou and Wagner, and victim Christophe, who lived across the road. Christophe and the other two men had their wages directly paid into Kocher's bank account, and Kocher took charge of paying their bills and bringing them food. 'It was very weird how Kocher was controlling all the three of them,' Steve said. 'It was almost like they were his slaves. He took their wages, put them in the house, paid the bills and food was taken across to them. 12 12 'But essentially they were paying for Kocher's house and living expenses too. "He was a conman, he coerced money out of his football team, he spun this yarn about himself having cancer as a sympathy thing. 'We just didn't understand why people were falling for it. You knew he was lying because his lips were moving. That's the best way to spell it out. He had a knack of manipulating people to his will. 'After he killed Christophe he even used his card to buy his wife an anniversary card. That kind of sums up what kind of a person he was. What kind of sick b*****d does that?' But how did Kocher persuade Bendou and Wagner to go through with the horrific crime against defenceless Christophe, who by this time had been their housemate for 18 months? 'Like Charles Manson' 'I always used to think it's a bit like Charlie Manson. How did he persuade these educated young people to commit such horrible crimes?,' Anton said. 'It reminded me to a degree of that. You've got Kocher who's clearly very manipulative and if you look at all of the people that we interviewed, he comes across as plausible, he's got a bit of a charisma about him and people are drawn in.' Kocher and Wagner were cousins, but had lived together from a young age so were like brothers. Bendou knew the pair from school in France and after getting into trouble as a young adult, had been taken under Kocher's wing. Wagner and Bendou were described as 'doing anything Kocher told them'. Cristophe came into the group by "pure chance". After working in Ireland, he got a job with Ryanair in Liverpool and moved to the city, initially sofa surfing. But a colleague at the airport passed him Kocher's number. 'Kocher says to Christophe, 'Look, you get the best room in the house with an en-suite, you just pay your money into my bank, so you don't have to mess around with English bank accounts because you can't trust them," says Anton. 'I will cook for you, clean for you. I'll have meals ready for you when you come in, all you have to do is work, enjoy your life, travel, do whatever you want and I will provide anything that you need. 'And Christophe, being relative naive, probably thought, 'What nice people'. When you speak to his family, that was a trait of Christophe. He took people on face value, he took them at their word, he trusted people. 'For 18 months everything goes swimmingly but at some point Christophe decides he wants to move to Brussels and starts making arrangements to leave. 'However for Kocher that means having to explain where all his money's gone because Christophe was actually paying for everything in that house. He was paying the rent, he was paying the council tax, the electricity bills, Kocher was using the victim's money to fund his own home and his life." Christophe was due to fly to Dublin to meet with his company's HR department on April 26, 2009. The brutal attack occurred three days before, on April 23 - but it had been a long time in the planning. 'If you look at the chronology, the plan to deal with Christophe in Kocher's mind had started some time before," says Anton. "He had been drip feeding Wagner and Bendou a story that 'This guy's evil, he's working for the authorities, he's working as a spy for the Americans and for the French, he's got an alter ego' – all false allegations of course. 'You can convince anybody to believe anything if you drip feed them enough information.' Steve recalls how some 'lucky' detective work uncovered more evidence against the three – including tracing the knives used in the attack to the local Asda who painstakingly went through files to find Kocher's card being used to buy three of the exact same knives. A neighbour recalled seeing the three men take a large package of some kind to the shed, from her window, around the time of Christophe's disappearance. Then in July 2013, after a painstaking first investigation, Kocher and Bendou were charged with murder and Wagner with assisting an offender and preventing a lawful burial. Anton spent every day in the trial, translating everything into French and relaying it to Christophe's family. 'No justice' Bendou and Kocher were convicted of murder but disappointingly Wagner was cleared and set free. Anton and Steve said they were 'absolutely gutted' that only two of the three were convicted as 'everything pointed to three men being involved'. Anton recalls Christophe's sister Aurelie looking at him in court after the verdict and saying in French, 'Wagner got away with it. How's that justice?' Over the months that followed, Aurelie's comments began to 'gnaw' away at him. 'It was a conversation I had in a pub one night with one of my colleagues from the team saying 'This isn't right. I wonder if given the relationship I've developed with Bendou, he can give us something that might allow us to have another crack at Wagner''. 'So we then had to persuade the senior officers that this was of value because these inquiries take tremendous amounts of time, resources and money. 'And thankfully Cheshire Police gave us a second shot.' Prison confession Anton went to see Bendou in prison and tried to persuade him to tell the whole story in its entirety. 'At first he said he would talk if he could get something out of it – like a transfer to France so he could be closer to his family,' Anton said. 'But I said 'No you either tell us because it's the right thing to do or you don't'. 'And he agreed, he allowed us to access his records from the law firm that represented him. 'And we start to learn things about Christophe's murder that we did not know during the initial investigation. 'Bendou describes in graphic detail how he had hit the victim's head with a hammer but the hammer had slipped in his hand with the blood and it was the claw end that went into his skull. I remember the room closing in on me and I started feeling a bit queasy. Retired inspector Anton Sullivan 'You could see distinctive hammer claw injuries in Christophe's skull. 'The first one, they miss and it hits the Formica top that later panicked Kocher painted over. Then we go back and find the exact divot in the Formica that forensically matches the hammer. 'Then he tells us when he pulled the the hammer out of Christophe's skull, because it was stuck there was a jet of blood that went all over the walls and the ceiling. That's why Kocher decided to paint the kitchen red because he thought it would help mask the colour. 'Also as he's pulling the claw out of Christophe's skull, Wagner is looking over his shoulder because they're in this killing frenzy, and he cracks Wagner on the side of the face by accident with the blunt end of the hammer, giving him a big bruise.' Investigators started going through Facebook pictures and found a selfie Wagner took while he was working in a bar at Cheshire Oaks, sporting a big bruise on the side of his face, which was verified and used as evidence in the second trial. Anton, who had by this point become close with Christophe's father Yves, and his brother and sister Noel and Aurelie, said hearing Bendou talking so nonchalantly about the savage murder made him feel sick to his stomach. 'From a personal note, it's really difficult as police officer deal with an offender and not be disgusted, we're humans first and police officers second,' he said. Timeline of the Christophe Borgye case The case was one of the most chilling and unusual Cheshire police had ever dealt with, here is a timeline of key events: April 2009: Christophe Borgye is killed by three men and his body is sealed in a concrete tomb under a shed. May 2009: A colleague reports his disappearance. A housemate, Dominik Kocher, sends a fake email to Borgye's family to make them believe he is safe. November 2012: The three men involved in the murder, Dominik Kocher, Sebastian Bendou, and Manuel Wagner, move from Ellesmere Port to Dumfries, Scotland. April 13, 2013: Sebastian Bendou confesses to the crime to the police, initially claiming he acted alone in self-defence. April 17, 2013: Wagner and Kocher are questioned as witnesses. May 2013: Bendou changes his statement, revealing Kocher's and Wagner's involvement. Both are re-arrested on suspicion of murder. July 2013: Kocher and Bendou are charged with murder, and Wagner is charged with two lesser offenses. March 2014: Kocher is convicted of murder. May 2014: Bendou is convicted of murder and sentenced to life with a minimum of 14 years. June 2014: An appeal to increase Kocher's sentence is rejected; he is to serve life with a minimum of 23 years. September 2016: Wagner is charged again with murder. June 12, 2017: Wagner's trial begins. June 28, 2017: Wagner is convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum of 16 years. 'I remember sitting in the room as Bendou described murdering Christophe in graphic detail and by this point I know his family and it's heartbreaking to listen to. 'You've got to have this professional attitude, but I remember the room closing in on me and I started feeling a bit queasy. 'I said to my colleague who's a highly experienced murder investigator ''How do you sit there and listen to that?' 'He said 'I've dealt with death all my life in the job but I've never had anybody sit there and tell me, as if I'm telling you how to make a cake, how they killed somebody with a hammer and a knife and how they coerced him into being in that position. 'It's actually quite unusual to get somebody to openly admit how they killed somebody.' Eventually, the exhaustive second investigation concluded and Wagner was convicted of murder and jailed for 16 years on June 28, 2017. The jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Christophe's three murderers were all finally in prison. Steve, who has a career spanning 30 years of murders across London and the North West, says it's one of the most unusual cases he's worked on. 'As a standalone single victim, what Christophe went through is absolutely horrendous. Plus the dynamic between the three of them is just definitely the weirdest thing I've ever been involved in," he said. For Anton, he was just glad the family finally had closure. 'I always felt that this was a story that needed to be told so that there was some legacy for the family, for the victim, and that they were remembered," he said. 'It's a case that will stay with me for a long time. I've left the police this year and I retired in order to help tell this story. 'If it hadn't have been for Bendou coming forward, I think Christophe would still be there to this day, I'm convinced of it. 'And if somebody had written this story as a drama purely fictitious, you'd say 'No it's too far-fetched, I don't get the plot line'. 'Truth is always stranger than fiction and in 32 years of policing I've seen the worst of people and I've seen the best of people and this case went from one polar opposite to the other. 'But the stoicism and the strength of Christophe's family and the lengths which police officers dedicated their time and effort to seeking justice really stay with me from this case."
BBC News
37 minutes ago
- BBC News
Man bailed by Kent Police after boy, 2, dies in Whitstable crash
A man arrested after a two-year-old boy died in a crash in a car park in Kent has been bailed pending further inquiries, Kent Police has said they were called to the junction of Harbour Street and Cromwell Road, Whitstable, at 20:24 BST on Saturday, after a crash involving a car and multiple boy was pronounced dead at the scene and a man was taken to hospital with serious injuries, said police. The child's next of kin has been informed.A man in his 20s arrested at the scene on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving has been bailed to return to the police station pending further investigation. A spokesperson for Canterbury City Council previously said: "Our thoughts are with everyone affected by last night's incident."We have officers on site today to offer help and support."Kent Police appealed for witnesses or anyone with CCTV or dashcam footage to get in touch with them.
The Sun
37 minutes ago
- The Sun
Heartbreaking tributes to woman, 27, ‘murdered' outside care home – as fourth man, 35, arrested by cops
A HEARTBROKEN family have paid tribute to a woman, 27, who was allegedly murdered outside a care home. Police found 27-year-old Zahwa Salah Mukhtar injured on Chadwell Heath Lane, Romford, at around 5.30am on Saturday. 6 6 6 Despite the best efforts of emergency services, the victim was sadly pronounced dead at the scene. Her family have been informed and are being supported by specially trained officers. In a heartbreaking tribute, released via the Met Police, they said: 'Zahwa was a kind and loving person with high aspirations in life and her presence brought warmth to those around her. 'She was dearly loved by her family and friends. 'Zahwa's tragic loss has left us heartbroken, and she will be truly missed by all who knew and loved her. 'Her memory will live on in our hearts forever.' Cops arrested a 35-year-old man on suspicion of murder, alongside two men aged 21 and 22 on suspicion of assisting an offender. The force yesterday made a fourth arrest as part of their murder probe. Another 35-year-old man has been detained on suspicion of assisting an offender and he remains in police custody. It is understood those involved were known to each other. Detective Superintendent Brian Hobbs said: 'Our thoughts today are with the victim's family and friends in light of this truly tragic event. 'Although we have now made arrests, local residents will continue to see an increased number of officers in and around the area while our investigative work is carried out. 'I would ask anyone who was in the area of Romford, who may have seen or heard anything suspicious, to speak to us.' A spokesperson for the Met Police added: "If you saw anything, or have any information then please contact police via 101 quoting 1625/16Aug. "Alternatively, to remain anonymous you can call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111." 6 6 6
