Inside Operation Cello: the Langley police crackdown to thwart car-thieving suspects

From Maidenhead Police Station, Detective Inspector Ryan Powell oversees an operation more than a year in the making as it reaches a pivotal moment.

In the early hours, scores of officers descend simultaneously on six addresses in Langley where suspects linked to a prolific car-thieving gang are believed to be.

Inside the control room, operation leaders watch as computer screens flash with rolling updates on the case, while voices crackle over police radios confirming the first arrests.

The stakes are high – as is the tension.

“You don’t sleep much the night before – up at 3am to be ready to go,” DI Powell said. “It is nerve-wracking.”

Officers gather at Maidenhead Police Station before the raids

Operation Cello has involved 15 months of painstaking intelligence gathering – sometimes driven by key tip-offs from the public through the Safer Langley initiative. 

Around 100 officers have been involved throughout the investigation, with more than 50 deployed to Langley for its culmination.

Body-worn camera footage from the raids shows officers battering down doors with a ram, charging into properties, arresting suspects and uncovering weapons. 

Shouts of ‘police, police, don’t move, stay where you are’ can be heard, with suspects shown to have barely had time to get out of bed before being arrested.

It is a dangerous job for the officers involved and that risk ‘certainly weighs on your mind,’ DI Powell said.

“The last thing you want to do is put officers in harm’s way,” he continued.

“However, having been a police officer now for 14 years, I’m very confident in our risk assessing and our tactical options to be able to mitigate that risk.”

Eight people were arrested during the dawn raids and seven were taken into custody at Maidenhead Police Station before being charged with a string of offences.

Six were from Slough: Freddie Sines, 19, of Moreland Avenue; Riley Pearson, 18, of Blunden Drive; Henry Gardner, 19, of Popes Close; Kashif Hussain, 21, and Assim Hussain, 27, both of The Frithe; and a 16-year-old boy.

Also detained were Alfie Waller, 18, of HMP Bullingdon; and Roy Sines, 19, of Tudor Road, Hayes.

“The stakes are high,” DI Powell said. “You put a lot of time and effort into it.

“But actually, we were relatively confident with the information we had that we were going to get some really good results.

“Ultimately, it’s been quite rewarding to be able to deliver for the victims of these crimes.”

Victims of the thieving gang, described by police as an organised crime group [OGC], stretched across counties.

DI Powell said the suspects ‘while based in Slough and identified through Safer Langley, have been charged with offences that include offences in the Royal Borough – Maidenhead, Windsor – and in South Buckinghamshire’.

“We know crime doesn’t stick to borders, and that was certainly a feature in this investigation," he added. 

The raids in Langley were part of a three-day crackdown on organised crime in the Thames Valley, which saw a total of 55 people arrested.

But DI Powell insisted, although the three-day co-ordinated action had finished, police would continue to hunt down those involved in wrongdoing and offenders could not ‘rest easy’.

He added: “People often think they call in, they fill out the online form, and then that information doesn’t go
anywhere.

“But every single little piece of information does build up to create an intelligence picture that enables us to tackle this kind of activity.”