An iPad spent five years in a river — then helped crack a murder plot

Victoria Craw

An iPad covered in mud and discovered after more than five years in the Thames has provided a crucial piece of evidence leading to the convictions of three men in a murder plot, London police said.

The device was discovered in November 2024 by London’s Marine Policing Unit when it was scouring the riverbank for items related to a July 2019 shooting that left a man paralyzed, Metropolitan Police said in an email Tuesday.

Although the iPad didn’t work, the SIM card was linked to a phone number for Daniel Kelly, 46, whom police suspected of being involved in the attack, police said.

On Monday, Kelly was found guilty of conspiracy to murder, along with Stewart and Louis Ahearne, brothers aged 46 and 36. The conviction marks the latest chapter in an international investigation in which the brothers were also convicted for their role in the theft of more than $2.3 million worth of historical artifacts from a museum in Switzerland.

“The recovery of the iPad supported our case theory that this [the iPad] had been utilised in the tracking of the victim and movement of communications devices tied to the defendants,” Detective Superintendent Matt Webb, who led the murder investigation and the Swiss robbery probe, said in an email. “To find this five odd years later in a tidal river was a real surprise! It also posed the question, why would somebody feel the need to discard an iPad in the river?”

Using information from the iPad, phone records, CCTV and license-plate recognition technology, police were able to show that Kelly and the Ahearne brothers placed a tracking device on the car of their victim - 45-year-old Paul Allen.

The shooting was carried out July 11, 2019, after Kelly and the Ahearne brothers spent weeks tracking and surveilling their target, police said. Allen himself was jailed for his role in the $68 million armed robbery of a Securitas depot in 2006, the BBC reported, before being released in 2016.

During the investigation, police found the car at the scene of the shooting had been rented by Stewart Ahearne on July 9 and used to commit a burglary in the southeastern county of Kent that same night. It was then driven to northeast London, where the victim lived, both on the day before the shooting and the day it took place, police said, with iPad data allowing the men to know “when and where their target would be.”

On the night of July 11, as Stewart Ahearne waited in the car, Kelly and Louis Ahearne sneaked into the yard of a house overlooking their target’s home, police said. At 11:09 p.m. six shots were fired into the home, hitting the man as he stood in his kitchen. He was left permanently paralyzed, police said.

By January 2020 the men had been arrested, each denying his involvement. At the same time, investigators were working with Swiss authorities after two 15th-century Chinese Ming Dynasty vases and a cup had been stolen from the Museum of Far Eastern Arts in Geneva, a month before the London shooting, police said.

The London shooting echoed elements of the Swiss heist, “including the use of a Renault Captur hire vehicle,” police said.

In the Swiss case, authorities also identified the registration number of a car leaving the scene, which had been rented by Stewart Ahearne in the days prior, police said. Stewart and Louis Ahearne were extradited to Switzerland and convicted in January 2024, with each sentenced to three years and six months in prison, banned from entering the country for five years and ordered to pay the equivalent of $60,000, police said. The attorney for Louis Ahearne declined to comment, and attorneys for Stewart Ahearne and Daniel Kelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Webb said the latest conviction shows that authorities will leave “no stone unturned” when it comes to tracking down criminals.

“This attack may look like the plot to a Hollywood blockbuster, but the reality is something quite different,” he said in a statement. “This was horrific criminality.”