Second Crimewatch appeal over shooting of Rhys Jones

Oct 29 2007

A SECOND appeal to find the killer of Rhys Jones will be shown on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme tonight.

Police are still searching for a vital witness they say could hold the key to finding out who shot the 11-year- old schoolboy as he walked home from football practice on the Croxteth Park estate on August 22.

He is believed to have been the innocent victim of gang rivalry.

Crimewatch first ran an appeal a month ago when the programme screened a reconstruction of the events leading up to Rhys’s murder, and the boy’s mother Melanie personally appealed to the killer’s mother to hand him over.

Afterwards, 12 people rang the show with the same name of a possible suspect. Now it is hoped that a further appeal could finally catch the person responsible.

Merseyside Police has since dropped 3,000 leaflets around the area.

The force is also putting up a billboard in another specific attempt to track down a woman who was driving through the area in a red car at the time of the murder, who may have narrowly missed colliding with the gunman as he made his escape from the scene on a push bike.

Eighteen people have been arrested so far in connection with the incident. No-one has been charged.

It is believed that as Rhys crossed the car park of the Fir Tree pub with friends in the early evening of August 22, he was caught in the crossfire between the teenage gunman and his intended victim, who had been lured to the location.

The gunman is thought to be about 16 years old and around 5ft 8in tall. He was wearing a black tracksuit with a hood on the night of the murder.

Crimewatch is on BBC1 at 9pm.

THOUSANDS of Merseysiders are wearing purple ribbons and wrist- bands as part of the Liverpool Unites campaign, to rid the region’s streets of guns. To read more stories about the joint campaign by the Daily Post and its sister paper the Liverpool Echo, log on to www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk