Robert Brazendale buried guns in garden of home on Selworthy Drive

The 34-year-old, from Thelwall, was today locked up for 11 years and three months – having been an ‘essential cog in a machine which ran guns to other criminals’.

He was responsible for stashing and supplying an astonishing cache of weapons, including assault rifles and machine guns.

Brazendale was brought to justice by the National Crime Agency, who arrested the armourer twice within six months in equally dramatic circumstances.

His first detention by armed police was made in front of shocked shoppers at Tesco Express in Grappenhall on the afternoon of April 27 2020.

He was riding his bike when he was arrested near to the entrance of the store – where he had dealt firearms in the car park weeks earlier in broad daylight – and was found in possession of an EncroChat phone.

Dramatic footage captured at the scene saw plain clothes officers, including some wearing balaclavas, pinning him to the ground.

Brazendale's arrest at Tesco Express on Knutsford Road

A total of £17,000 was then seized during a search of his storage container at Latchford Locks.

But Brazendale was released under investigation, allowing him to flee the country for the Costa del Sol.

This led to him being held on a second occasion, this time by Spanish national police on a European arrest warrant, in the town of Estepona on October 20 2020.

An NCA search of his home on Selworthy Drive followed on November 9 2020, during which two taped packages were found buried in the back garden.

One contained a loaded Smith and Wesson 9mm semi-automatic pistol and approximately 100 rounds of ammunition, with a Grand Power semi-automatic pistol and more than 20 rounds of ammunition – as well as a suppressor – recovered from the other.

A man and a woman in their 60s were arrested at the address, but were later released by police.

Brazendale was extradited back to the UK on December 17 2020 and later admitted conspiring to transfer prohibited weapons.

But this pair of pistols was far from being the most frightening weaponry he had gotten his hands on.

His role had been to store the firearms and to be a point of contact between Umair Zaheer, who brokered the deals with other gangs, and couriers who collected the guns.

Brazendale and Zaheer’s dealings in ‘astonishingly lethal arms designed to wreak havoc of the most catastrophic kind’ were revealed when the authorities infiltrated EncroChat in 2020 and gained access to messages exchanged between criminals.

On April 14 2020, the latter had offered a list of weapons and ammunition for sale on the encrypted communications platform – including an Uzi submachine gun, a Skorpion submachine gun, an AK47 assault rifle, pistols and a silencer.

This list was sent to Bilal Khan, who used the hand LegendKiller, and an agreement was made to purchase an assault rifle for £10,500.

A courier was dispatched to the convenience store and met Brazendale there at around 4.30pm the same day.

And a second transaction followed around 20 minutes later – Hitesh Patel arriving from London in order to pick up a machine pistol, the Uzi, a Taurus Brasil revolver and ammunition in exchange for £37,000 in cash.

Hitesh Patel

However, he returned to the capital without an AK47 as the firearm would not fit into a concealed compartment inside his Toyota Yaris.

This gun was instead picked up by Khan the following day and transferred to a vacant office on Firecrest Court on Centre Park, a site which he was employed by a consultancy firm to oversee.

Zaheer visited the unit on that date and both posed for pictures while brandishing the firearm.

Khan with the gun

Zaheer brandishing the firearm

Less than a week later on April 21 2020, the premises was raided by the NCA and the East German AK47 was found inside a black Gelert rucksack hidden in a roof void along with two clips of ammunition a quantity of ‘soft-nosed’ ammo – designed to explode upon impact with the target and cause ‘catastrophic levels of injury’.

Khan was arrested at his home in Didsbury the following day, while Zaheer was detained on the East Lancs after a chase with police on April 23 2020.

Umair Zaheer

Firearms linked to Patel were recovered during a raid in Brent, West London, seven days later from behind a false wall within a bedroom cupboard.

The gun transferred in the first exchanged was then seized from an address in Astley on June 6 2020 after being discovered in a grey and black Slazenger holdall alongside two clips of ammunition.

Khan and Patel, of London, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess firearms with intent to endanger life and were handed jail time of 10 years and eight months and seven years and five months respectively.

Bilal Khan

Zaheer, from Eccles, admitted the same charge as well as conspiracy to supply cocaine and cannabis and was caged for 25 years.