A British court convicted three men Friday for a supermarket blast in Leicester, central England this year that killed five people in an attempted insurance scam. The court found Aram Kurd, who was renting the shop, and friends Arkan Ali and Hawkar Hassan guilty of murder after they plotted to destroy the business and claim insurance on it. The trio used 26 litres (seven gallons) of petrol in their scheme, which caused such a powerful explosion that some residents nearby thought a bomb had gone off.
The blast on February 25 destroyed the entire building, killing Ali’s girlfriend Viktorija Ijevleva, 22, and a family who lived above the shop. The family included Mary Ragoobeer, 46, and her teenage sons Shane and Sean, along with Shane’s 18-year-old girlfriend Leah Beth Reek.
Ragoobeer’s husband Jose was working at the time of the explosion and a third son was rescued from the rubble. Prosecutor David Herbert told Leicester Crown Court the three defendants had left Ijevleva to die in the shop because “she knew too much” about an insurance policy on taken out on it just three weeks before the blast.
