UK killer tried to borrow shotgun

THE CUMBRIAN taxi-driver and mass-killer Derrick Bird, who fired 54 shots when he went on the rampage in June, killing a dozen people and injuring a further 11, tried to borrow a more powerful weapon during his killing spree, it emerged yesterday.

Just after he killed his brother and family solicitor, Bird called on a neighbour to borrow a Winchester shotgun, but he refused to hand it over. The neighbour, who had no inkling that Bird had already killed, had no reason at that point to raise the alarm with police, according to a review published yesterday.

Bird, a father of two aged 52, took his life in a wood as police cornered him two hours after his rampage began. The official inquiry said the Cumbrian Constabulary, which licensed him for three shotguns, could not be blamed for the killings because they had carried out all expected checks.

“There were no reasonable opportunities for the licensing system to have been the instrument of intervention to prevent the appalling offences subsequently committed,” said the inquiry’s author, Assistant Chief Constable Adrian Whiting of Dorset police, who heads the Association of Chief Police Officers’ firearms group.

The taxi-driver was fined £100 and banned from driving for a year after drink-driving in 1982. Eight years later, he was given a six-month suspended sentence for stealing and handling decorating materials belonging to British Nuclear Fuels, his then employer. In 1998 police investigated an argument he had with a girlfriend, and in 1999, claims of menacing behaviour over a taxi fare. Neither incident led to prosecution.

Bird’s right to hold weapons would have been reviewed if the Revenue and Customs, who were probing his tax affairs, had upgraded his file to “impending prosecution”, but this had not happened by the time of the killings.