Headless man link with double shooting

POLICE hunting the killer of a Kuwaiti businessman whose head was cut from his body, badly mutilated and buried miles away, are investigating links with a double shooting in London five days ago.

The dead man was identified - and the possible links to the other attack discovered - after the Independent published a medical artist's reconstruction of the severed head last week.

Greater Manchester Police said yesterday that the torso of a man found in Manchester last December was that of Adnan Al-Sane. His head, which had been hacked with an axe or machete to make it unrecognisable, was found 75 miles away in a playing field at Cannock, Staffordshire, last January. Tests showed it had been severed after he died. A post-mortem examination revealed that Mr Al-Sane swallowed a tooth during the attack.

DNA checks linked the head to the torso. Dental records and fingerprints taken from the dead man's flat in Maida Vale, west London, confirmed that it was Mr Al- Sane.

Manchester detectives are 'liaising closely' with Scotland Yard officers investigating a double shooting last weekend in which a couple, both 31, were shot in Paddington, west London. The man was hit four times and the woman once. The couple, who have not been named, are in a serious but stable condition in St Mary's Hospital, Paddington.

The wounded man was a business associate of Mr Al-Sane. He was being sued in the High Court by the dead man for the recovery of pounds 600,000.

A lawyer representing Mr Al- Sane recognised him from a reconstruction of his head by the medical artist Richard Neave, of Manchester University.

Detectives said six box files relating to his stocks and shares dealings were missing from Mr Al-Sane's flat. He was last seen alive in a London hotel in December, shortly before his partially burnt body was found beneath a railway arch near Piccadilly station in Manchester.

Mr Al-Sane had lived in London since retiring, when he was 38, from the Kuwaiti bank he partly owned. He came from a wealthy family, was said to be a millionaire and dealt in stocks and shares as a pastime. He had no known links with Manchester, police said.

Detective Superintendent Bernard Rees, leading the hunt, said: 'It is bizarre and mystifying. A financial motive is the only one I can think of at the moment, unless someone tells us something to the contrary.'

(Photograph omitted)