He was sitting on Aer Lingus flight EI105 from Dublin to John F Kennedy Airport, New York. It was due to depart at 10.55am on April 5 this year.
Edward John Best - who used the aliases John Komori, and John Eum - for social media profiles, thought he had got away with an horrific crime. He was just minutes away from being airborne and on his way back to the US.
But a small, dedicated, and driven team, of police officers were using their nous to find him. As passengers settled in their seats, Best was pulled off the flight.
Two days earlier, armed with a hammer, he had falsely imprisoned a woman in a house in Hyde, Tameside, for more then three hours. It was the terrifying conclusion to an ill-fated 4,000 mile journey he had made from Chicago to Manchester to confront the woman's cousin, with whom he was obsessed.
After staking out the house for days Best, 26, climbed onto wheelie bins against a rear wall, dropped into a backyard, and walked into the property through an open door. The woman he was seeking was away on holiday. By chance her cousin was there feeding her cat.
Best barricaded the house - putting furniture across the front door and locking the back one. He then rooted through the house after holding the hammer to the petrified woman's face. He took a photocopy of the birth certificate of the woman he had come to find, and her old passport.
His hostage managed to send a message to the landlord of the house urging him to call 999. Best vaulted over the back wall and ran off when help arrived. The clock then began to tick for Greater Manchester Police's Force Critical Wanted Unit - the manhunters.
The woman Best was seeking had stopped a three-year online relationship because his behaviour was becoming obsessive, a crown court sentencing hearing was told last week. He wanted to keep phone calls on while she was sleeping so he could listen to her breathing. He also made numerous, terrifying threats.
Detective Inspector Simon Akker, head of the seven-strong team, regards what happened over the next 48 hours as one of the unit's finest achievements this year - but one of many. "We came into it the following morning. We were asked to support the Tameside District police. They told us they had an individual who they suspected was responsible for an aggravated burglary and false imprisonment, and they believed he had been stalking someone who was not present at the address. They said they did not know a lot about him but really needed our help.
"With the circumstances it was clear there was a risk to the public. My officers are specialists, they are trained with all the techniques of tracking people. Normally we know who we are after - a name, a date of birth, a background. With Best we had a Facebook profile in a false name. We then had to unpick around that who that social profile may be.
"Obviously we can apply for data from companies - but with this there was a criteria for information to be passed to us because there was a danger to the public. We were able to collect information from a variety of sources and from that we got information about contact he had had with his intended target, and we were able to build up a profile of Best.
"By the end of the working day - so by 4pm - we knew who he was, his date of birth, how he had come into the country, he had flown from Chicago to Istanbul, to the UK, we knew how he had paid for that, we knew he had got an Airbnb and we knew where that was. We were able to tell the investigators of the crime to tell the victim we were progressing."
DI Akker's team apply to companies for information on account holders. "In this modern world - how people pay for things, how people travel, all of that leaves a trace. Some companies are more forthcoming than others. Every contact leaves a trace is a forensic saying - but it is true in communications too," he says.
GMP swooped on the Airbnb address they had for Best in Gorton - but he had left an hour earlier. "We were able then to put a lot of alerts out - on the Police National Computer we circulated him as 'wanted'." Overnight, Best travelled to Birmingham by train to try and get a flight to New York - but missed it by 40 minutes.
"We found out he had gone to Birmingham and then to the port of Holyhead, by identifying a phone he was using, and we thought we might have lost him and that he had got out the UK. In fact he had done - he had got to Ireland and was boarding a flight to the US. Negotiation skills by our team were then used to brief others on the risk Best posed - as a result he was kicked off that flight to America - the Americans did not want him and he was refused access to Ireland. The Gardai then brought him back to Holyhead on a ferry. He was sat on the plane - we were very much on the last minute."
Dogged police work had resulted in the unit discovering Best was on the Aer Lingus flight. "We just phoned people asking them to check flight lists to see if he was on them - can you have a look for this guy on your flight, we think he might be trying to get back to the US. Old fashioned human to human talk.
"We don't have any jurisdiction in Ireland. We just had to give them the facts and rely on the people to make the decisions for that airline and Ireland. It was down to intelligence we shared and the fact there was a threat to life. We had an opportunity to mitigate that threat. We didn't know what he was going to do after he had landed in the US. He could have come back and if had had got into the country without using his passport we had no control over him - it was critical we got him as soon as possible.
"We will never know what Best would have done had the woman he was seeking been in the house rather than her cousin. We know he had weapons and was volatile, and had come here with intent, and had issued obscene threats online. It is entirely possible that could have been a violent outcome. He thought he was scot free - getting back home to regroup and do whatever next."
DI Akker's unit is made of up of a sergeant and five constables. "Even though the Best job was extraordinary, the jobs we get are very rewarding," he says. This year the unit has had 36 targets which they have been asked to find and have arrested. In addition in tracking them down they have come across other offences, resulting in five more arrests. They have also recovered two firearms, 30 rounds of ammunition, ten of thousands of pounds worth of cash derived from criminal activity.
"We are investigators as well as manhunters and have come across drugs lines. This year we have arrested ten murder suspects. We will not stop if they are overseas - we will try and help the investigators bring them back. We have done seven firearms operations this year - where a suspect could be armed themselves or the individual is so dangerous unarmed staff would be at risk."
Offences for which suspects have been arrested range from threats to kill; robbery; burglary; murder, conspiracy to murder; death by dangerous driving; and serious assaults. Last year the unit arrested 48 targets and an additional 21 people for other offences. In 2020 the figure was 96 - swelled by a spate of attacks between rival crime groups in North Manchester, and swoops in Blackpool where targets were involved in county drug lines activity.
One important capture for the team was the killer of 25-year-old dad to be, Charlie Elms, who was chased down a street before being stabbed to death after a 'pointless' feud erupted in deadly violence. He was knifed in the back by teenager Karl Marler on Oldham's Limeside estate in May 2021.
Marler, 17, has been jailed for at least 16 years after being found guilty of murder. DI Akker said: "That was a quite complex investigation because Mather was only young and did not really have a financial footprint, social media footprint, and there was a lot of people helping him. He was going from house to house being looked after. We visited lots of people and arrested a lot of people and disrupted many. Eventually we got information from the community to say where he was going to be and we got him. He was still wearing the same clothes he had on at the time when we got him two weeks later."
In many of the unit's operations there is deliberately no publicity about the pursuit. "If someone doesn't know we are coming that's a surprise for them and it is always easy for us when we do," DI Akker says. However, in a current case, a high-profile target has been named.
On August 22, detectives named the man wanted on suspicion of murdering Thomas Campbell, whose body was found by a neighbour having suffered a 'quite horrific' level of injury. The man they are seeking is 28-year-old John Bellfield, of the Openshaw area, with members of the public warned to not approach him. Mr Campbell, 38, was found dead at a property in Riverside in Mossley, Tameside, on July 3.
DI Akker said: "Bellfield is currently a priority for us. Naming someone does bring a lot of information in - but it is not all going to be right. We tend to be quite specific in what we check."
The team were also instrumental in catching one of the killers of Cole Kershaw, from Bury. Cole, a talented boxer, was gunned down as he tried to run away from a car crash following a chase through narrow streets north of Bury town centre on August 12, 2020. A bullet struck him in the chest, penetrating both lungs and the main artery to his heart.
DI Akker said: "That was down to negotiation with a foreign police force. Cole was killed and a number of suspects were identified and through operations we were able to strike on a couple of people. We identified that one suspect, with others had left the country. We had really good information to say he was in Amsterdam. We knew that was a stop for a connecting flight for him to leave Europe. We shared information with police in Amsterdam and within hours he was arrested at gunpoint."
The man they were after , Khayam Ali Khurshid, of Eton Hill Road Bury, was later one of three men convicted of Cole's murder and must serve 27 years.
The importance of the unit as a key part of the force's weaponry is evident when reading a statement from the woman that Edward Best was stalking. In an impact statement submitted to Manchester Crown Court she described how he had made her feel like "an emotional hostage".
In a statement, the woman who had been in the online relationship with him, said Best had left her terrified. "It has affected my sense of wellbeing, especially when I am inside the house I don't feel safe anymore. I have been finding it difficult to sleep as I have been getting nightmares about him.
"I already suffered from PTSD and had been getting therapy. My side effects have become enhanced.
"If I hear a slight noise I get very jumpy and I feel I am high alert and paranoid. I received messages from 'John' for the past three years and after a couple of months his aggressive behaviour began. I felt very vulnerable and he treated me like he owned me. He was manipulative, he made me afraid to talk to my friends as he would harass them the more I spoke to them.
"As a result I lost a lot of friends. I suffer from anxiety and struggle to make friends in person so all of my friends are online. These friends stopped speaking to me as they felt they were in danger as I was speaking to him. Eventually I lost all my friends as I had to come off-line to escape what was happening.
"He coerced me to send him images and if I didn't reply he sent them to my friends or posted them online publicly. I felt my parents looked at me differently after that, they didn't trust me, it rocked our relationship, and it felt like all my fault.
"I felt held hostage emotionally, like if I didn't carry on talking to him it wouldn't stop. He would get more angry. It also affected my work. I would try and work online because of my anxiety and do art commissions, sell T-shirts to third party sites, and make jewellery to advertise on Facebook. He found this and harassed people that had liked it.
"As a result I had to shut this down which affected my finances. This had a ripple affect and contributed to my depression. After he came to my address I feel violated that he has been through my things. He took a photocopy of my birth certificate and an old passport, which concerns me as if he ever gets released he knows my details."
Thanks to the efforts of Tameside CID and the manhunt team Best was jailed for seven years after admitting stalking between January 1st and April 3rd 2022; attempted false imprisonment; false imprisonment; and having an offensive weapon.
Summing up the qualities which members of his unit require DI Akker says: "Determination, flexibility - they work incredibly long hours when they need to - if we have a 'gold' target everything else stops - that's what Best was. They don't have a day off - it is all go until we get them. They tend to be short investigations because we throw everything at it because they represent a threat to the people of Greater Manchester.
"It is just experience that officers have built up. The way people communicate and exchange information is changing every day and we are evolving as that evolves. It is traditional policing too - talking to people. We can have someone wanted for a violent crime who is very vulnerable themselves and we will go and talk to the family to help us help them."
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