The bravest of cops, a cowardly killer - the awful truth about Dale Cregan, ten years on

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

PCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes didn't stand a chance as they responded to what they thought was a routine report of a burglary. The pair stepped out of their police van and walked up to the front door of a three-bed maisonette, into a slaughter that was so gratuitous the shock still reverberates today.

Inside was one-eyed fugitive Dale Cregan - wanted for murdering two gangland rivals. Before the officers had even knocked on, the merciless killer burst through the door, shouted 'police' and unleashed a hail of bullets on the two unarmed officers, probationers who had only just joined GMP. He tossed a hand grenade on their dying bodies and then calmly handed himself in at the nearest police station.

Ten years on, M.E.N. crime reporter John Scheerhout, who wrote a book about the awful murders perpetrated by Cregan, revisits one of the most shocking crimes Greater Manchester has ever seen, a crime that has left deep scars - not only among families and friends of the two fallen officers, but in policing.

To say he simply shot dead two officers doesn’t give the merest hint of the extreme violence used by Dale Cregan when he launched his sickening assault on the morning of September 18, 2012. Any one of the 32 shots he fired from his Glock - with its extended magazine - could have killed either officer. Parts of the attack were so gratuitous as to defy belief. It shocked the nation.

As he opened the front door to the maisonette in Abbey Gardens, Mottram in Longdendale, to confront the approaching officers, he blasted them both in the chest. The only reason they didn’t perish there and then was because they were wearing body armour.

Both made a run for it. PC Bone tried to dart to the side across the front garden while PC