Police hit streets in armoured cars after dad's murder

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Crime News

Toxteth

As part of the ECHO's unsolved crime series, we have looked back at one of the most high-profile murders this city has seen - the gun death of David Ungi

The brutal assassination of a dad-of-three sparked a bloody battle that saw gun-toting police officers deployed in armoured cars to patrol the streets.

Mr Ungi tried to escape, but was hit twice - with one of the bullets hitting a main artery. He collapsed and died at the scene. While the facts of Mr Ungi's murder are relatively well known and accepted, the reasons for his brutal street execution are harder to pinpoint. In his book 'Drug Wars', Neil Woods describes how each of the armoured estate cars carried a team of police armed with Heckler & Koch semi-automatic carbines. This was the first time routine armed patrols had been deployed on the streets of mainland Britain in peacetime, instead of armed teams being dispatched for specific operations.

As May turned into June, violence and tensions were rising and the family of Mr Ungi were becoming increasingly upset by the fact they were unable to lay him to rest. Relatives and friends told the ECHO that his body could not be released until the killers had been caught, as any defence team would need the chance to carry out a second post-mortem.

The incident led to scenes of chaos as riot police, brandishing batons and shields, held back a crowd of around 600. A firefighter responding to the blaze was injured when the windscreen of his fire engine was shattered, and another man was pulled from his vehicle and beaten by masked men who stole his phone and stoned his car.

Two days after Mr Ungi's murder, detectives linked an arson attack on the bar Cheers in Aigburth Road to the killing. Reports from the time, and in the years since Mr Ungi's death, talk extensively about a fist fight the former Golden Gloves boxing champion had with another man, Johnny Phillips, the previous March.

The shooting was not the first street execution in Liverpool, but experts believe it marked a change in gun crime on the city's streets. Rumours swirled that he may have been killed over a seemingly minor feud. An anonymous source quoted in a 2005 ECHO article said: "It used to be that guns were used as a last resort. Anything minor was usually settled with a straightener.

 

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