Man who planned fatal armed robbery guilty of murdering PC Sharon Beshenivsky

A man who masterminded a fatal armed robbery has been found guilty of murdering police officer Pc Sharon Beshenivsky.

Pc Beshenivsky was shot dead while interrupting a raid at family-run Universal Express travel agents in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in November 2005. She and her colleague Pc Teresa Milburn were shot at point-blank range by one of the three men who had just carried out the robbery.

Now, almost 20 year after her death, Piran Ditta Khan has been convicted of her murder. He is the last of the seven men involved in the robbery to be convicted. Khan, 75, fled the country and flew to Pakistan two months after Pc Beshenivsky's death. He was arrested by Pakistani authorities in January 2020 and extradited to the UK last year.

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Prosecutors said former takeaway boss Khan was the group's ringleader and, although he did not leave the safety of a lookout car during the raid, played a "pivotal" role in planning it and knew that loaded firearms were to be used.

They told jurors this made him guilty of PC Beshenivsky's murder "as surely as if he had pulled the trigger on that pistol himself".

Khan told jurors he had no knowledge that a robbery was going to be carried out, or that weapons were going to be taken.

He claimed the business's owner, Mohammmad Yousaf, owed him £12,000 and that debt collector Hassan Razzaq offered to get his money back after the pair met through a business associate.

Khan said he thought the men Razzaq sent would "intimidate" the staff at Universal Express, or at worst, "slap them".

Prosecutor Robert Smith KC said Khan's claim of being defrauded was an "entirely false" attempt to explain why he was in Bradford at the time of