Two alleged accomplices of Dale Cregan charged with helping the cop killer evade arrest PIC: GMP
Two alleged accomplices of Dale Cregan charged with helping the cop killer evade arrest (GMP)

Police have charged three people with helping one-eyed cop killer Dale Cregan evade capture for two gangland murders.

At the end of his spell on the run last year, Cregan murdered police officers Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes in a double murder that shocked the nation.

Marvin Herbert, Raj Mohammed Khan and Patricia Kelly are accused of conspiracy to assist an offender.

Herbert, 41, was hunted down to the Costa Del Sol in Spain, where armed arrested him at a boxing gym.

He battled extradition but was returned to Britain under an international arrest warrant. Officers with guns joined him in the dock at Manchester magistrates court.

It is alleged that Herbert, Khan, 41, and Kelly, 55, all helped Cregan during a huge manhunt by Greater Manchester Police, last year.

The one-eyed killer spent a week on the run while police hunted him for killing gangland rivals David Short, 46, and his son Mark, 23. On the eighth day of his flight from the law, Cregan lured PCs Bone and Hughes to a house by calling 999 and then killed them in a brutal gun and grenade attack. He then drove a police station and turned himself in.

Cregan was sentenced to spend his whole life behind bars for the four murders, in June. Just months in to his sentence at Strangeways prison, Cregan went on hunger strike while in solitary confinement. He was transferred to a psychiatric hospital.