The man who was with the intended target of gunshots that killed Olivia Pratt-Korbel in Liverpool has been identified by police, detectives have said.
Olivia, 9, was shot dead in her own home on Monday by an unknown hitman who was chasing convicted burglar Joseph Nee and an accomplice at the time.
Nee burst into Olivia’s home after her mother, Cheryl, opened the front door because she heard a disturbance outside.
The career criminal, aged 35, remains in hospital after he was also shot during the incident.
He has been arrested for breaching the terms of licence conditions imposed on him after he was released from prison for previous offences and will be recalled to prison, Merseyside police confirmed.
It has been reported that, so far, he is refusing to cooperate with detectives.
As for his accomplice, while police have identified him, but it is not clear if he has been arrested or not.
The force made an appeal to the gunman to surrender himself for the murder of a young girl, but Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Kameen said the gunman has “failed” to come forward.
“We will not rest until we find you, and we will find you,” Mr Kameen said in a direct message to the gunman at a press conference on Thursday.
The killing, on Monday, in the city’s Kingsheath Avenue, occurred following a spate of violence in the city which has seen three people killed in a week.
Liverpool Echo crime reporter Jonathan Humphries told Sky News there had been an “explosion of gun violence” in the last week.
He said: “People are trying to process it, people are trying to work out how to understand it. This will take time to understand.
“There seems to be a sudden uptake in fatal gun violence which has come to a surprise to everyone.”
Speaking on Wednesday, Ian Byrne, Labour MP for West Derby, which includes Dovecot, said: “The nature of this crime and what happened to Olivia and her family, who are completely innocent in all this, has really reached out and touched people.
“It’s gone to the heart of what we are as a community, what we are as a city, and what we are as a country.”He added that he believed information would “get into the police’s hands [to] take these people off the streets”.
