Shane O'Brien was one of Britain's most
wanted criminals.
He murdered 21-year-old Josh Hanson in
October 2015
and went on the run for three and a half years.
DCI Noel McHugh and his team tracked him down.
You see Josh is in the bar with his
girlfriend and with friends.
And Shane O'Brien is with his group.
Towards the end of the evening Shane O'Brien stands up
and he uses words to the effect of: "What's your problem?"
At which point you can see Josh is really quite surprised, shocked.
And Shane O'Brien has reached into his pocket.
He's taken out what we now know
to be a Stanley knife and he's
cut Josh from his ear across to his chest.
That's a 37cm cut, longer than a ruler. It caused a gaping, catastrophic wound.
He then turns around and calmly walks out the bar.
And we would see that he was drinking from beakers. We recover fingerprints. We know it's Shane O'Brien
and we that's how we were confident that it was him.
He was wearing a Canada Goose jacket but on that jacket there were spots of blood that were Josh's blood.
Early on in the investigation we released his picture with a serious crime reward.
The phone rang and this lady had seen the picture
and she believed that he'd been in the
pub and it was Ashford.
They've stayed at a caravan site. He would go out with his friend, they would have beers
and he looked really quite relaxed, not as if he's just killed somebody.
The police found this Volkswagen Golf
and tracked it.
The next thing we know is that they go to Ashford shopping center where he buys new clothing.
If you've just committed a really serious crime, you'd kind of grab whatever came to hand
but he's quite relaxed about it, very
calm and always paying in cash.
And then we were so confident. We knew that we
were there, unfortunately about 12 hours behind.
Where is he going to make a mistake?
Could he have gone out on the Eurostar? Could he have gone out through one of the ports?
We weren't actually thinking that he would have gone out on a plane.
So he's obviously been well supported to find out, I need to fly out the country, I need to fly out on a private plane,
no questions asked, no passport.
From Germany he had exited the plane and
that would be one of our last known
sightings of him. We now know that he has
travelled around Europe. So in Prague he
got into a dispute in a nightclub.
Police were called and he would subsequently be
arrested and he claimed to be Italian.
It was a relatively low-level offence but
police took photographs of him,
of his back, his tattoo, which had been changed. And they took his fingerprints.
They had no reason to doubt his identification and
they released him on bail.
And his fingerprints would subsequently be
identified as being Shane O'Brien.
A huge amount of work went on
with the hunter team which is
effectively the manhunt team out in
Prague. They would identify a barber's
that he would go to. He had boxing gloves
on him at the time of arrest significantly.
We knew that he was boxing,
he must be in gyms.
They would also later identify the tattooist.
So I received a phone call from a solicitor who said
that Shane O'Brien was contemplating
handing himself in, which seemed
almost too good to be true.
Initially it was going to be in Budapest and you think
is this another ruse to sort of pull us all the way over?
It got changed to meeting in Romania so we worked with the Romanian police
which would ultimately result in them
detaining him.
He came back to the UK, he was flown back by our extradition unit.
You're still trying to ask yourself why on earth did you do this?
He said that he felt intimidated by Josh,
that he reached forward, he never
intended to connect with Josh, which in
itself is really hard to comprehend or
see it from O'Brien's point of view
because the cut is from Josh's ear across his chest.
Just imagine how difficult it is when you cut through a box with a Stanley knife.
You know when there's resistance.
There's too many unanswered questions about what Shane O'Brien was up to.
People will hopefully have the confidence to call in because we'll be really interested to find out
who were the people supporting him? How did they work together?
And what was he actually doing when he was aboard?
You want to shout.
You want to grab O'Brien's arm to try and stop him.
You know we can never bring their loved one back but we can bring some closure
to the chapters of this nightmare that they go through
and get them the truth about what happened.
