Special investigation: So how DID Raoul Moat die?

Lying with his eyes closed in a hospital mortuary, the killer Raoul Moat is silenced at last. Cream bandages swathe his skull and an NHS sheet is tucked over his shoulders as two men peer at his face.

One is an officer from the Northumbrian Police, which launched a huge seven-day manhunt after Moat shot his ex-girlfriend Samantha, executed her boyfriend, and blasted local PC David Rathband, blinding him for life.

The other man looking down at Moat in the Freeman Hospital mortuary in Newcastle-upon-Tyne has a distinct military bearing. He is Moat's uncle, a guns expert and former Army Royal Artillery officer, Charlie Alexander.



Raoul Moat's uncle Charlie Alexander claims that the killer's face is unmarked and that if he had shot himself as police state he would have suffered the same horrendous injuries as his victim, Pc David Rathband (right)

Today, he is challenging the police who say Moat ended his rampage by killing himself with a shot from his own sawn-off gun after a six-hour standoff on the riverbank in the picturesque village of Rothbury, Northumberland.

In a deepening controversy over the final seconds of Moat's life, Mr Alexander has accused the police of killing his nephew in the early hours of Saturday morning a fortnight ago.



He says the police either shot Moat with the bullet of one of their own assault rifles, or with the powerful dart of a new super-Taser gun, the XREP.

Yesterday, Mr Alexander told me why he is not convinced the full story has come out.



'In the mortuary, I looked at my dead nephew's face,' he said. 'There was not a mark on him from his neck to his eyebrows, where the bandaging began. It made me suspicious.

'He had dark circles under his eyes as if he'd had a night out on the tiles. There were the tiny skin blemishes you would expect to see on the face of any 37-year-old man, especially one who has spent a week in the open air being chased by police.



'But there was no hideous disfigurement.

'When the policeman at the mortuary explained that under my nephew's bandages there was an entry wound on one side of his head and an exit wound on the other, I shook my head.

'From my Army experience of firearms, that makes no sense at all - the pellets from his own shotgun would have taken away half his face. They would have sprayed out instantly because the barrel had been shortened and sawn off.'

Police armed with both Tasers and Heckler and Koch assault rifles during the tense 6 hour stand-off with Moat

The official version from the police is that Moat killed himself at 1.12am on July 10, 20ft from a line of officers armed with Heckler and Koch 36C assault rifles and the powerful XREP Tasers, newly imported from America.

They say that in those crucial seconds, one shot was fired by Moat with his sawn-off shotgun and two others by police using the XREP Taser, which is sold as 'non-lethal' weapon designed to halt a fleeing suspect in his tracks.

After the manhunt for Moat so vividly caught the public's attention, the dramatic stand-off was reported minute-by-minute on television through the night - until a mortally injured Moat was taken away by ambulance to hospital, where he died soon afterwards. The crucial incident, however, took place away from the cameras.

In death, fierce debate has surrounded the killer as it did in the final days of his life. The pathologist who conducted an initial post-mortem decided that his injuries were 'consistent' with a 'gunshot wound' to the head. The only other significant marks on Moat's body, said the pathologist's report, were a narrow bruise across his arm and a number of insect bites.



While expressing their sorrow for his victims, Moat's family - including Mr Alexander, who describes himself as the killer's 'surrogate dad', and Moat's brother Angus, a tax inspector - insist the full facts about his death have not been revealed.

Of course, Moat was a brutally violent killer for whom we should spare no sympathy, but it cannot be right if there has indeed been any kind of cover-up.

A 'shotgun shell' Taser round of the type used during the Rothbury incident

The family has now paid for a second post-mortem, which was conducted last Wednesday. The results are due back next week and Mr Alexander hopes they will solve any mystery once and for all. He insists he is not criticising the police, but wants the truth.

'There are so many questions that need answers,' he said yesterday.

'The most important is why don't my nephew's injuries resemble those of the blinded policeman PC Rathband, who still has 200 pellets in his face - even though he was shot by my nephew's gun a few days earlier?'



It was just after 7pm on the evening of Friday, July 9, that Raoul Moat was accosted by police after being spotted walking near Rothbury's primary school. Surrounded by officers on the north bank of the River Coquet, a few hundred yards from the High Street, he sat down with his sawn-off shotgun pointing at his head.

There he remained for several hours as darkness fell. His gun stayed in his right hand even while he was eating a police sandwich with his left. In front of him was ranged a line of 35 marksmen.

Police dogs barked in the background, and arc lights were set up in front of him, shining up into the sky so he would find it very hard to see any police activity beyond the immediate circle of land in front of him, where the negotiator and the marksmen stood.



Moat had had two hours' sleep in the previous 24 hours. He was growing tired. At points during the long stand-off, he held the shotgun with the sawn-off barrel pointing at his chin. Sometimes, he put the barrel tip to his right temple.

Police pictured during their confrontation with Raoul Moat. It is believed to be the first time they have deployed the new 'shotgun' Taser, with a range of up to 100 metres

Once he lay on the ground, again holding the shotgun to his face, and moaned: 'If Sam [Stobbart, his former girlfriend and the mother of one of his children] hadn't s*****d a copper, none of this would have happened.'

He rubbed his hair continually, a sign of stress and acute weariness. At 11pm, the rain was coming down in earnest, but he refused a waterproof coat from police.

An hour later, with Moat drenched and in an even darker mood, police tension was growing. They feared he was about to commit suicide. The final act in the drama came when Moat issued what the police called a 'living will'. He mumbled: 'Tell the kids I love them, tell Sam I'm sorry.'



What happened next is now in dispute. According to police, Moat pulled the trigger on the shotgun as it pointed towards his right temple. Immediately, say witnesses in Rothbury, the waiting marksmen moved forward and jumped on him.

In an official statement issued that night, the police said 'a shot or shots' had been fired and that the suspect had a serious wound and had been taken to hospital.

However they later amended this, saying no gun shots were fired by police officers and that Moat had shot himself. But then they admitted that one police Taser had also been involved in the confrontation, before saying it was two.

At the opening of Moat's inquest ten days ago, an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigator explained the marksmen's Tasers were fired to stop him 'killing himself'. This was the first indication that the XREPs could have been fired before Moat pulled his own shotgun trigger.

Steven Reynolds, the IPCC investigator, added: 'At some point around the time of the fatal shot, two West Yorkshire firearms officers with Tasers discharged their weapons at Mr Moat. It is not clear whether the Tasers were fired before or after Moat turned the gun on himself.'

Taser International's eXtended Range Electronic Projectile (XREP). The weapon is currently subject to testing by the Home Office Scientific Development Branch

The confusion is just one of many worrying puzzles. This week, the Mail heard an audio tape of the seconds during which Moat was mortally wounded. Three loud cracks can be heard, against a background of pelting rain and barking police dogs.

Perhaps significantly, in the light of the mystery bruise found on Moat's arm during the post-mortem, a man's voice is heard screaming 'my arm, my arm' before the police start shouting: 'Man down, shots fired, get the gun.'

The tape will be examined by the IPCC, which will report to the coroner before a full inquest. But its contents add support to the theory that Moat was hit by one, or even two, shots from the new Taser before he died.

Did the Taser rounds precipitate his death? The XREP, invented in the U.S., makes the same loud crack as a rifle or shotgun when fired.

The peace organisation, Amnesty International, says although the 'super-Taser' is marketed as a ' nonlethal' weapon, it is 'effectively a shotgun that fires electric shock bullets'.

It propels a four-pronged barb which digs into the flesh as a 50,000- volt electric shock pounds into the victim's body. It is so powerful it makes the muscles of a human target contract, so he becomes rigid and collapses on the ground.

If the target tries to pull out the barbs, a further wave of the painful current pushes into him for an extra 20 seconds. If he tries again, the same thing happens.

Police marksmen were given just ten minutes' training with these Tasers. When they then learnt how to 'load, point and shoot' on a Rothbury industrial site, the barbs sunk ten inches into the full black rubbish bags they aimed at.

So could an excruciating shock by the Taser have caused the bruising on Moat's arm? And did it force Moat to make an involuntary movement and pull the trigger on his shotgun while the barrel was pointing to his skull?

Moat's uncle, Charlie Alexander, says: 'You are not meant to fire a Taser if someone has got a weapon in their hand.'

Another possibility is that, as tension grew among the police marksmen that night, one may have make a mistake and discharged his weapon. Was it a police rifle that actually killed Moat, the bullet passing cleanly through his upper skull and leaving his face and neck without a mark on them?

Mr Alexander thinks it is a possibility. Of course, his theories could easily be wrong.

Certainly, David Dyson, a firearms' expert consulted by the Mail, said Moat's own shotgun would have made similar clean 'entry and exit' wound if the sawn-off barrel was close up to his face.

' The pellets would have entered his skull like a lump of lead and exited like a lump of lead. They would have had no time to spray out,' he said.

On Thursday afternoon, Mr Alexander and some of Moat's closest friends viewed his body at a chapel of rest. He was still wearing the bandage to cover his gun wounds. A few spikes of the Mohican hairstyle he grew while in prison were sticking out through the top.

Among the group was Anthony Wright, one of Moat's closest confidants, who was escorted by police to the Rothbury riverbank to plead with the killer to give himself up.

Mr Wright recalled afterwards: 'When I got there, the police said Raoul was calm and they had the situation under control. They expected to be talking to him all night and maybe into the next day. The negotiator was a real professional and I saw he was stunned when Raoul killed himself.

'Why did it change so quickly from the police wanting me to speak to Raoul, and him shooting himself? Something must have happened.

'Later I saw the negotiator had his head in his hands. He was saying it wasn't supposed to happen like this...'



