A GANGLAND enforcer starting a 20-year jail term has been found hanged in his top-security cell.

Brendan Flynn was half of a hit team, who fired 20 shots from a pump-action rifle in three separate bids to kill members of another crime family.

But last week the 29-year-old was sentenced to a year behind bars for each bullet after a judge branded him "a very dangerous man".

He was held in the top-security F wing at Wakefield jail. It is the prison where serial killer Dr Harold Shipman hanged himself last January, and it currently houses infamous lifers, including Britain's most violent inmate, Charles Bronson, and "cannibal killer" Robert Mawdesley.

Flynn was found dead early on Wednesday morning, apparently having taken his own life.

West Yorkshire police said a post mortem is yet to be carried out but there were no suspicious circumstances.

When Flynn appeared at Manchester Crown Court, he and another un-named man were described as gangland "soldiers" involved in a turf war with a rival gang in Gorton, Manchester, in December last year.

They used a Remington .22 pump-action rifle in three attacks.

In the first, they fired through the window of a house in Albert Avenue, shattering the glass and spraying the room with nine rounds but, remarkably, missing the 28-year-old woman inside.

The young mum leapt over her couch and hid behind it as bullets thudded into the wall behind her. Two days later, on Hyde Road, another would-be victim fled when he noticed a number of masked menand heard one shout: "Kill him!"

Desperate

He heard gunshots and saw one round ricochet off a metal fence close by, but he also escaped unscathed.

A week later Flynn, a father of two from Manchester Road, Hyde, took the Remington to a house in Chapman Street, Gorton.

The man inside - a relative of the woman shot at earlier - heard a knock at the front door. As he went to answer it, a bullet ripped through the wood at chest height, just missing him.

He ran into his lounge, and in a desperate attempt to defend himself threw his son's BMX bike through the window.

But more shots were fired though the window, hitting him three times, in the chest and left arm. His injuries were not serious. Flynn claimed he was not the triggerman, but accepted he looked after the weapon and was present at each shooting.

He admitted three counts of attempted murder and three of having the rifle with intent to endanger life.

Jailing him for 20 years, Judge Clement Goldstone said: "It is said you were a foot soldier, but you were well trusted by others to look after the weapon and ammunition.

"In my view you are a very dangerous man who provided this firearm in attempts to kill which were as determined as they were unsuccessful.

"The incidents all took place at night and must have been utterly terrifying for the victims."

After Dr Shipman hanged himself in Wakefield jail,concerns were raised that the authorities had failed to notice warning signs that he was contemplating suicide. An independent inquiry into the circumstances of his deathhas yet to report.

Flynn's death has been reported to the police and the local coroner but will also be investigated by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, Stephen Shaw, who took over responsibility for inquiries into all deaths in prison from last April.

A spokesman for the Home Office said Flynn had not been on suicide watch.

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