Published Friday, 27 January 2012
A prosecution lawyer said that ACC Alistair Finlay was in the Ardoyne area with other senior PSNI officers in an unmarked car receiving a briefing about policing issues in North Belfast when they spotted the trio running from a pawnbroker's shop.
After the gang made off in a waiting car, the senior police officers drove after them and the robbers crashed into the back of a woman's car which was turning right on the Oldpark Road.
Two of the raiders were rendered unconscious by the collision and a third who ran off 'had the distinction of being arrested by a chief inspector nearby' according to the Crown lawyer.
That man was former Irish boxing champion - 38-year-old James Clarke who lived nearby on the Oldpark Road.
The court heard that he had been shot three times in a paramilitary attack which left him with life threatening injuries before the robbery and he wanted to get money to flee the Ardoyne area to live in Dublin, according to his lawyer.
During the armed robbery a man in the shop on the Ardoyne Road was threatened with a gun and a knife after the three men demanded cash from him.
He gave them three empty envelopes and they tied him up, unaware that he had £400 in his trousers.
Clarke was sentenced to three years in jail and two years on licence for the robbery.
One of his co-accused Gerard James Thompson, 19 and of no fixed abode, was sentenced to 18 months in jail and two and a half years on licence.
The third accused Anthony McKeown, 26, from Church Crescent in Newtownabbey was jailed for two and a half years with a similar period on licence.
The court was told he too had been subjected to a paramilitary attack seven years ago.
Judge Patrick Lynch QC commended ACC Finlay and his colleagues for their actions.
He said: "It's nice to see our senior officers can get out from behind a desk and get on with policing in its more basic forms."