Met PoliceA Ming vase stolen from a Swiss museum. A shooting at a comedian's house in Woodford, east London. The robbery of a luxury apartment in Sevenoaks, Kent.
These seemingly unconnected events were all part of a web of international organised crime that police untangled after a six-year-long investigation.
A key piece of evidence - an iPad, found under an inch of sand on the foreshore of the River Thames just downstream from the O2 Arena.
Its discovery was pivotal to the investigation that has led to three people being found guilty at the Old Bailey of the near-assassination of one of Britain's most notorious armed robbers.
When found by a police officer with a metal detector on a cold November morning last year, the iPad was found caked in mud having been underwater for more than five years.
Forensics were able to clean it and open the Sim tray – which still contained a pink Vodafone Sim card.
Call data that was subsequently salvaged provided damning evidence on three men - Louis Ahearne, Stewart Ahearne and Daniel Kelly - who were all also involved in a heist at a museum in Switzerland a month earlier.
"I've questioned this a lot," Det Supt Matthew Webb ponders. "Is it calamitous blunders tripping them up or was it just they were so blasé they wouldn't get caught?"
A 'meticulously planned' assassination plot
The Ahearne brothers and Kelly first caught the attention of police after gunshots pierced the silence of a late summer evening in an affluent Woodford area on 11 July 2019.
Six bullets tore through a glass conservatory at a luxury property owned by comedian Russell Kane that had been rented out to Paul Allen.
One severed one of Allen's fingers, the other went through his throat and became lodged in his spinal cord, leaving him struggling to breathe and bleeding profusely.
"He's been shot, he's been shot!" Allen's partner, Jade Bovington, screamed.
Met Police
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