THE MAN WHO HELPED DALE CREGAN DISAPPEAR
What the court actually found about Irish Imy's role and the very different story he tells today.
Fourteen years to the day after PC Nicola Hughes was murdered, her father spoke about the woman she would have become. Five and a half weeks before she died, a man from Chadderton drove her killer out of Manchester and kept going back to help him. A jury convicted him for it. He now says he gave three men a lift.
Bryn Hughes still sees Nicola as his little girl. She was 23 when Dale Cregan murdered her and PC Fiona Bone on 18 September 2012. Fourteen years on, marking the anniversary, her father told the Oldham Times that he struggles to imagine what she would look like now. Whether she would have married. Whether she would have had a family. What her life would have become. Sometimes he stops himself thinking about it because it hurts too much.
What stays with him are the small things. Nicola writing careful notes as a child after she had been told off, setting out who said what, what had happened and what she had done wrong, sometimes with drawings to illustrate the evidence. Looking back, he laughs that she was already taking statements. She would be 37 now. She never got there.
Jessica Rothwell
There is another Oldham story about what happened after the summer of 2012. It is the story of Mohammed Imran Ali, and most people in this town know him as Irish Imy.
WHAT THE JURY HEARD
I want to be precise about this. Ali was not convicted of murdering Nicola Hughes or Fiona Bone, and no court found that he knew Cregan would go on to murder them. What a jury did convict him of is serious enough without adding anything to it.
On 10 August 2012, Dale Cregan, Anthony Wilkinson and Jermaine Ward went to David Short's home in Clayton. Cregan and Wilkinson chased him through the house, shot him repeatedly and then exploded a hand grenade against his dying body. Minutes later Cregan attacked the home of Sharon Hark with a pistol and a second grenade. A third grenade was exploded to destroy evidence.
Ward's account of what happened next was read to the jury at Preston Crown Court on 5 March 2013, from his statement and his recorded police interviews. He said Cregan came back to the van with blood on him, shouted at him to drive, rammed a gun against the side of his head and told him which way to go. Then an Asian man, who the prosecution said was Mohammed Imran Ali, took the three of them out of Greater Manchester and across the Pennines to an apartment in West Yorkshire, and kept them supplied with food while they hid there.
PA
Ward said he was kept in that flat for ten to twelve days. His phone was taken from him. Cregan and Wilkinson watched television, laughed at the news reports about the reward on their heads, and threatened to shoot him and his family if he tried to leave. Once they put a grenade in his mouth. With them in the flat was a heavy-duty bag containing two black pistols, one silver pistol and around twenty hand grenades. After ten to twelve days they drove him out, dumped him from the van, and he walked into a police station in Huddersfield to hand himself in.
That is Ward's account, given to police and put before the jury by the prosecution. Ali denied the charge and gave evidence. The jury convicted him. When Mr Justice Holroyde sentenced him on 13 June 2013, he accepted one point in Ali's favour, that he may have become involved at short notice, and then rejected the rest.
Ali had played "a willing and important role". It was not "a single, brief act of assistance" but "a course of conduct which was intended to provide, and did provide, valuable assistance to men who had committed murder". He "must have known what they had done".
The judge's findings were that Ali;
- provided the transport,
- secured the accommodation,
- visited the three men on later occasions and continued to assist them.
He noted Ali's bad record for drugs offences and recorded that Ali's own evidence at trial was that he had "more generally lived a life of crime for many years". That, the judge said, justified a sentence well towards the maximum for the offence. Only personal mitigation brought it down to seven years.
Read it here.
In an interview published by the Labour Party supporting Oldham Reporter on 10 January 2026, as he prepared to stand for Oldham Council, Ali gave a different account. He did not know Cregan. A friend rang and said he needed help. When he got there, there were three men. "They told me they'd shot Dave Short, we need a place to stay and lay low. I took them to an apartment I had access to in Leeds, dropped them off there, and that was it. Six weeks later, the idiot has done what he's done, and we've all been remanded in custody."
Charlotte Hall
His account leaves out the visits, the continued assistance and the fortnight in the flat. The jury did not believe it. Yet Charlotte Hall left all of this out. Why?
What "the idiot has done" was telephone the police with a false report of a burglary, wait for the two unarmed officers sent to it, open fire on them and then use another grenade. The judge recorded that Cregan remained at large until 18 September 2012, and that Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone died that day performing their public duty.
Ali was not convicted of any part in those murders, and I have seen no evidence that he knew they were coming. But a jury found that in the days after 10 August, when the police were hunting the men who had murdered David Short, Irish Imy was the one who drove them out of Manchester, found them a flat and kept going back to help them.
TEN GRENADES IN GLODWICK
There is a second Oldham connection to this case that has almost vanished from public memory. On 3 June 2013, while the Cregan trial was still running, police recovered a bag from a storm drain on Onchan Avenue in Glodwick. Inside it were ten M75 hand grenades. ITV reported that they were the same type used in the murders of Nicola Hughes, Fiona Bone, David Short and Mark Short, and that police believed the cache was linked to Cregan.
Ward told police there were around twenty grenades in the bag in the Leeds flat in August 2012. Ten of the same type were in a drain in Glodwick ten months later. I have seen nothing that connects the two, and I do not suggest Ali put them there or knew they were there. But think about what it says about the world around this case. Ten of them were sitting in a drain in the town where Nicola Hughes grew up in a Pakistani gangland stronghold.
They are counting on you doing nothing
Every council that buried a rape gang did it on one assumption. That you would read it, shake your head, and go back to your day.
Oldham. Rochdale. Rotherham. Telford. Manchester. Different towns and cities, different councils, different police forces, same decision. The children were expendable and the votes were not.
Nobody has gone to prison for that decision. Nobody has lost a pension. The politicians, police and public officials who made it are still in office, or retired on the public purse, or sitting in the Lords, or even Prime Minister.
These people are not frightened of the BBC. They are not frightened of the Sunday papers. They are not frightened of an inquiry, because they write the terms of reference. The only thing that has ever put a name in front of a court, a document in front of a council chamber, or a councillor out of a seat, is a small number of ordinary people paying a few pounds a month so that I can keep doing this without asking anyone's permission.
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I am the one the mainstream press will not touch because I said it first and I said it about their friends. The letters from lawyers come to my address. The threats come to my phone. If they ever find a way to shut this down, it is my door they will kick down, not yours.
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THIS WAS NOT HIS FIRST PRISON SENTENCE
Cregan was not the beginning of Ali's criminal history. In 2010 Greater Manchester Police appealed publicly for help in finding him after he breached the licence attached to an earlier seven-year sentence for drugs offences. He had been jailed in 2004 and released in 2008, and police said at the time that they also wanted to speak to him about further drugs offences. This article from 2013 details Ali's convictions. Read it.
John Scheerhout
Then came the murder of David Short, the help he gave Cregan and his associates, the trial at Preston and another seven years. He was released early. In 2018 he was recalled to prison again for breaching his licence.
So when he talks about rehabilitation, this is the chronology. This was not crime, prison, release and redemption. It was prison, release, recall, more serious offending, prison again, release again and another recall.
WHAT HE ASKS US TO FORGET
In that same January 2026 interview, as the reporter left, Ali shouted after her: "don't look at my past, look at my f****** present!"
Charlotte Hall
I have looked at his past, and I have set it out here from the judge's own words and from the account the jury heard. I believe a man who wants to sit on Oldham Council and asks voters to forget what he did should at least be made to describe it accurately. He has not. He has told the town he gave three men a lift. The court found that he hid them, went back to them and kept on helping men he knew had committed murder. And somehow, the grenades used to kill two police officers, turned up in a drainpipe in Glodwick.
His present is a separate story, and it runs through the leader of Oldham Council and a business hub next door to senior council officials in the Spindles. I will tell it next.
I publish everything for free. There are no paywalls on any of my work. Between January and September 2026, over 250,000 different people read an article on this newsletter. On 6 September 2026, our total membership, paid and free combined, passed 15,000. Admittedly, a small step BUT just look again at how many people are actually reading the articles. Our social media engagement figures for the year so far are in the tens of millions.
It has taken me eight years to get this far. I am unique in this space because I came from inside it. I am a Muslim of Bangladeshi heritage, raised in Oldham to immigrant parents. I spent years advising government on community cohesion and counter extremism. When I write about Islamists, the Biraderi or how Labour learned to buy its postal votes, I am describing what I grew up beside and later watched the state pay to manage.
I come at this from the inside. Inside the communities where these crimes are committed and from inside the government that facilitated the cover up.
If Andy Burnham and his Labour Party had their way, I would be in prison. If many in Reform and Restore had their way, people would place no value in my work, because my work adds pressure on them to do the right thing.
I do not just educate people on the rape gang cover up. I put the pieces together and expose the rot that allowed it to happen. I evidence and explain the Pakistani Mafia, the Biraderi, that has infiltrated our democracy and its use of postal vote fraud to rig elections. I document and share my insights into the growing Islamist threat and how the Labour Party and the liberal metropolitan elite are complicit in the demise of our democracy.
Politicians have tried to imprison me. Pakistani gangsters follow me home. The police have dawn raided my home on numerous occasions and have been exposed in the High Court for protecting those that want me taken care of. No one should be surprised that Islamists have tried to incite my murder or how the legacy media have run hit piece after hit piece desperately trying to smear my good name.
Despite everything, eight years later, I am still here, and so are you.
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Raja Miah MBE
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