TWELVE PEOPLE were murdered and more than two dozen injured, three seriously, by a lone gunman in Cumbria yesterday, who shot some victims at point-blank range as they lay wounded on the ground in one of the United Kingdom’s worst mass murders.
Taxi driver Derrick Bird unleashed his attack before 10am yesterday, following a late-night argument with fellow taxi drivers in Whitehaven, a small seaside town in Cumbria, late on Tuesday night.
Police alerted local radio stations within minutes of discovering the attacks, urging people to stay indoors, and began a desperate hunt for Bird, who had driven at speed out of Whitehaven, shooting through a smashed windscreen.
He killed himself following a four-hour rampage at up to 30 different locations during which he lured some victims to his car by asking for directions before shooting them, while others were shot again as they lay wounded on the ground.
While the alarm was raised in Whitehaven, the killings began minutes before in Frizington, a village between his home and Whitehaven. There local solicitor Kevin Commons was killed at the local rubbish tip.
Mr Bird arrived at the Whitehaven taxi rank at about 10.30am, where he shot three drivers, killing two of them, before driving around shooting wildly at locals and holidaymakers, who fled into shops.
He shot dead Kenneth Fishburn on a bridge near Egremont and Susan Hughes, whom he shot again as she lay wounded on the ground; before shooting a young farmer, Garry Purdham, as he trimmed hedges with his uncle.
Cyclist Barrie Moss came across Bird, dressed in shorts, in Egremont where his taxi was stopped on the road, with the door open. “He turned round at stared at me and he just had this absolutely huge sniper rifle.”
Two more – a man cycling and a Jane Robinson (66), who was delivering shopping catalogues to homes – were shot in Seascale, near the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant.
The cyclist was named as Mr Michael Pike (64), a father of two and former Sellafield shop steward.
The nuclear plant, where Mr Bird worked before becoming a taxi driver, was locked down immediately once the alarm was raised.
Bird then turned and headed inland before he crashed his car near the village of Boot. Amid fears that he was going to attack a holiday camp, he then entered a wood where he shot himself, police said.
Families holidaying in tents on a campsite near Boot were thrown into panic when they saw police helicopters overhead and heard reports that an armed man was heading their way after abandoning his car.
Bird (52), a divorced father-of-two, who lived in an ill-kept cottage in Rowrah village, was described some neighbours as quiet and likeable, but others were harsher in their judgments, calling him moody and miserly. None of them knew he kept guns.
Bird was badly assaulted by a youth who refused to pay a fare in 2007 in an attack, which, he said later, left him reluctant to work nights. The youth was subsequently found guilty of causing actual bodily harm.
Three victims were last night struggling with serious injuries. Such was the pressure on local hospitals that some injured were flown by air ambulances to Scottish and Lancashire hospitals.
In 1987, Michael Ryan (27) shot 14 people dead in Hungerford, while Thomas Hamilton in 1996 killed 16 children, aged just five and six years old, along with their teacher in Dunblane.
Following Dunblane, tough gun control laws were introduced. All weapons now have to be registered with the police and securely stored; while handguns, semi-automatics and pump action rifles have been outlawed since 1997.
Saying that she shared the country’s “grief and horror”, Queen Elizabeth said she was “deeply shocked” by the murders.
The prime minister David Cameron said lives and communities had been “suddenly shattered”.