£54million Securitas robbers Lea Rusha and Stuart Royle are up for parole nearly a decade after ringleader Paul Allen got out of prison despite failing to repay a confiscation order
Two crooks who took part in Britain’s biggest cash robbery are making a bid for freedom nine years after one of the ringleaders struck a release deal.
Lea Rusha and Stuart Royle are up for parole nearly a decade after Paul Allen got out of prison, despite failing to repay a confiscation order. It comes after three men were convicted of attempting to murder Allen who was shot in the neck as he stood in the kitchen of his home in July 2019. The cage fighter was previously convicted over the £54million raid of a Securitas warehouse in 2006. Much of the cash is still missing. He was released in 2016 after serving half of an 18 year sentence.
A judge in a closed court later agreed with prosecutors that Allen should be let off the hook of paying back £1.9million of “criminal benefit” that he made from the armed raid.
Allen also escaped without having to serve an extra five-year sentence for failing to return the cash. On Monday, Louis Ahearne, 36, his brother Stewart Ahearne, 46, and Daniel Kelly, 46, were found guilty of plotting to murder Allen with others unknown.
The motive for the attack is thought to be linked to an earlier attempt on Allen’s life in 2018, when a woman was shot outside his home in Woolwich, south east London.
Detectives said they found no direct connection between the shootings and the robbery. Rusha, 48, was previously released from prison only to be recalled.
He is now up for parole after serving his minimum 15 years of a life sentence for the Securitas raid in 2006. Rusha and cage fighter Lee Murray posed as police officers to abduct depot manager Colin Dixon, his wife and their child during the raid.
Rusha was disguised using prosthetics and a fake ginger beard. Robber Jetmir Bucpapa was deported to his native Albania after he was released in 2020. Murray is now serving 25 years in a Moroccan jail for drug dealing.
Dad-of-two Rusha, of Southborough, Kent, worked as a hod carrier and was a kickboxer before the robbery. More than £30million is missing from the raid on a Bank of England cash depot in Tonbridge.
A court found that Rusha’s share was likely to have been among £21million, found shortly after the robbery. CCTV showed the balaclava-clad gang armed with a shotgun and an AK-47 assault rifle threatening to kill the depot’s 14 staff.
Rusha was among five men convicted of the crime in a 2008 Old Bailey trial. In 2016, Paul Allen – described as the enforcer to raid mastermind and cage fighter Lee Murray – was freed despite handing back just £420 of £1.9million he is thought to have pocketed.
Murray is now serving 25 years in a Moroccan jail for drug dealing. Rusha said he had been having a curry with a pal on the night of the robbery.
But he was unable to explain at his trial why he was found in possession of balaclavas, a night vision scope, a revolver, shotgun cartridges, plans of the depot, and a surveillance tape of the Dixons’ home.
Emir Hysenaj, a 28-year-old Post Office worker of Crowborough, East Sussex, was given a determinate sentence of 20 years and is also understood to have been released.
A spokesperson for the Parole Board said: “We can confirm the parole review of Stuart Royle has been referred to the Parole Board by the Secretary of State for Justice and is following standard processes.”
They added: “We can confirm the parole review of Lea Rusha has been referred to the Parole Board by the Secretary of State for Justice and is following standard processes.”
