Undercover: The True Story of Britain's Secret Police by Paul Lewis, Rob Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

target, was the Harrow branch in north-west London.
    That night, Lucas reported, Sheppard says he returned from setting fire to his allotted store and turned on the radio to listen to the BBC World Service. The newsreader announced that three Debenhams stores had been subject to arson attacks – including the branch in Harrow. According to Lucas, Sheppard said in his testimony: ‘So obviously I straight away knew that Bob had carried out his part of the plan. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Bob Lambert placed the incendiary device at the Debenhams store in Harrow. I specifically remember him givingan explanation to me about how he had been able to place one of the devices in that store, but how he had not been able to place the second device.’
    Lambert has consistently denied planting the incendiary device in the Harrow store. Whatever the truth, the simultaneous strike that night had by far the biggest impact of the ALF’s campaign for all the wrong reasons. Although police would have had advance notice of the plan, through Lambert, the sprinkler system at the Debenhams store in Luton’s Arndale shopping centre had been turned off to be repaired. There was nothing to douse the small fire ignited by one of the incendiary devices in the menswear department. Firefighters discovered the fire at 1.50am on Sunday. It took 80 of them, pumping water from 10 engines, until 6.39am to bring the blaze under control. Four floors of the store were gutted, and the store was shut for weeks. A black-and-white photograph from the morning after shows a fireman hosing down a mass of smouldering debris that looked like the scrunched aftermath of an earthquake. Insurers later calculated that the damage, including loss of trading, amounted to £6.7m at the Luton store alone – far more than any of the other arson attacks in the ALF’s campaign against the sale of fur by high street stores.
    The store at Harrow was also badly hit, costing Debenhams £340,000. The fire alarm went off just before 1am, alerting the police and the fire brigade. Police constable Simon Reynolds from Wealdstone police station arrived within minutes and found ‘a thick blanket of smoke’. With the help of a torch, PC Reynolds and a colleague discovered the sprinklers working in ‘an area badly damaged by fire and water’ in the section of the store selling luggage on the first floor. The carpets, clothing and goods were sodden.
    John Horne, of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch, confirmed that ‘an improvised incendiary device had functioned against the wall in a display area’. He told the court: ‘Amongstthe debris I was able to identify the heavily charred remains of a small cardboard box, an alarm clock and what appeared to be the remains of a vehicle light bulb, and a dry cell battery.’
    Police testified only one device was planted at the Harrow store. Two devices in the other Debenhams stores had failed to ignite and so police found them intact. Care had been taken to ensure no fingerprints were left on the small homemade devices, which had labels stuck to the side: ‘Warning – Do not touch, ring police, Animal Liberation Front.’ In Sheppard’s version of events, Lambert had again earned his spurs as an ALF activist during the attack on Debenhams. ‘I was already confident in him anyway but after that, I would have had absolutely no doubts whatsoever that he was a genuine ALF activist, because it simply would not have entered my mind that a police officer would carry out such an action.’
    The attacks bore all of the characteristics of an ALF mission executed without a trace. If it were not for Lambert, detectives might never have worked out who planted the devices. Police made their arrests a couple of months later, bursting into the ground-floor bedsit of a corner house in Hillside Road in Tottenham in north London at 4.50pm on Wednesday September 9.
    Sheppard and Andrew Clarke, the other ALF activist who would