Three guilty over shop blast deaths

THREE men who killed five people in a “bomb-like” shop blast have been convicted of murder and plotting to claim a £300,000 insurance pay-out.

Arkan Ali, Hawkar Hassan and Aram Kurd used “many, many litres of petrol” in an arson attack on Kurd’s supermarket — causing an explosion which completely destroyed the shop and a flat above the premises.

Leicester Crown Court heard how some residents living near the Polish supermarket on Hinckley Road, Leicester, thought a bomb had reduced the property to rubble.

A five-week trial was told the defendants left shop worker Viktorija Ijevleva, 22, to die in the building because she was aware of the insurance policy taken out less than three weeks earlier.

Opening the Crown’s case at the start of the trial, prosecutor David Herbert QC told the jury the defendants intended to maximise the damage to the premises and “would have known” people would have been in the two-storey flat above.

Ali, 38, Hassan, 33, and Kurd, 34, were assisted by a Kurdish interpreter throughout the trial after denying murder and alternative counts of manslaughter.

But they were unanimously found guilty of five counts of murder. The trio were also convicted of conspiring with Ms Ijevleva to make a gain, by dishonestly pursuing an insurance claim in respect of the fire.

Ms Ijevleva, Mary Ragoobeer, 46, her teenage sons Shane and Sean, and 18-yearold Leah Beth Reek, 18, who was Shane’s girlfriend, were all killed in the blast on Sunday February 25.

Around 26 litres of petrol was used to start the fire in the basement of the supermarket, triggering a massive explosion at 7.01pm. CCT V and traffic camera footage released by police at the end of the trial shows people escaping from a nearby takeaway moments after the explosion, and rubble being blasted into the roadway as cars pass by.

Footage recovered by police from a neighbouring business showed Ali in shot three days before the blast – moments before the camera angle was moved.

Kurd was also recorded on a security camera as he escaped from the scene at the rear of the shop.

Ali, of Drake Close, Oldham, Hassan, of Eld Road, Coventry, and Kurd, of Hillary Place, Leicester, were remanded in custody and will be sentenced in mid-January.