Inside elite unit hunting Manchester’s most wanted fugitives

In the hours after his drug-fuelled driving killed a three-year-old girl in Manchester, Rawal Rehman holed up in a cafe over the county border in Lancashire and made plans to flee the country.

The 37-year-old was scrolling through his phone in a makeshift bedroom upstairs when police stormed the building and chased him into a storeroom.

Rehman had been hunted by a specialist fugitive team – the Force Critical Wanted Unit (FCWU) – formed by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in the aftermath of the hunt for serial murderer Dale Cregan in 2012.

While the team cannot go into too much detail about their methods – they work to the principle that “every contact leaves a trace”.

This year the FCWU was named GMP’s Team of the Year by Chief Constable Sir Stephen Watson, who said: “By definition, we trust and expect this team to hunt down the most dangerous; most prolific; most devious; and most evasive of criminals.”

Det Insp James Coles has led the unit since January 2024.

Back in 2012, he was one of the first detectives on the scene after Cregan shot and killed two fellow GMP officers – PCs Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone – while already on the run for two gang related murders.

It was in the aftermath of that devastating case that the idea for the FCWU was formed.

“It was recognised that there was no formal fugitive hunting team within Greater Manchester,” Det Insp Coles said.

“It was recognised that they needed some kind of formal structure to how we deal with that.

“A lot of forces will stand up a fugitive hunt as and when they need to, whereas quite a lot of specialist skills, a lot of learning goes into finding people.”

GMP said the results of setting up the FCWU, which Det Insp Coles took over in 2024, have spoken for themselves.

Last year the unit made 112 arrests, up from 96 in 2023, but so far in 2025 it has already made around 119 arrests and identified 91 targets.

Many of the FCWU’s targets involve criminals known to have access to guns, posing an obvious risk.

One example was Ethan Glasgow-Lattibeaudiere, whose name landed on the desk of the FCWU after chasing down a taxi on an e-bike, and shooting one of its passengers in the middle of a residential street in Oldham one lunch-time in January.

The 23-year-old, who also tried to shoot a second man but missed, fled the scene and went on the run.

However he was tracked down to an apartment in Hulme within 24 hours and arrested by armed officers. He was later jailed for 16 years.

In Rehman’s case, while there was no suggestion he was a firearms risk, the race was on to bring him in to face justice before he fled overseas.

The convicted drug-dealer had spent all night snorting cocaine in local massage parlours before getting behind the wheel of a van which ran over Louisa Palmasano in Manchester city centre on Saturday 22 February.

After leaving the little girl trapped under the wheels of the van in front of her parents, he grabbed his phone and ran away.

“I was with my family at a National Trust property on Saturday, and I saw it on the news and saw there’s a suspect outstanding,” Det Insp Coles said.

“So I thought this is coming my way Monday if it’s not been resolved.”

Det Insp Coles said thanks to the work of his colleagues running down leads over the weekend, the net had begun to close in on Rehman by Monday morning.

The hunt involved digital investigation techniques and undercover policing.

“I don’t want to go into too much detail about how we find people, our methods,” he said.

“We use lots of lines of inquiry and it was the person trying to live a general lifestyle through their kind of normal means.

“However, we live our lives, we buy things we use our phones, we go to places that we might not always go to but might feel reassured to go to, so this one was where I had a line of inquiry that took me to a property outside of GMP in Lancashire.”

Undercover officers put the property under surveillance but Rehman was not spotted.

Det Insp Coles said it came to a point where he had to make a decision, and ordered his officers to move in.

“I think we struck at the right times, with the information and intelligence that suggested he was trying to flee the country and once an individual does that, then it’s really hard to find them,” he said.

“I don’t know whether or not he knew we were coming for him, but he seemed quite resigned to some extent.

“Living on the run is pretty horrendous because you’ve got to think everything you touch from your previous life, we’re going to utilise and we’re going to exploit.”

The nature of the job means decisions have to be taken quickly under intense pressure.

However Det Insp Coles said: “It’s actually bizarrely the least stressful place I’ve worked in some respects.

“Quite often in policing it’s stressful because there’s an inordinate amount of demand and you don’t know where to put your resources at any given time, and that can cause problems.

“You have daily business, you have fluctuations in crimes and there’s demand on you that you almost feel sometimes you can’t can’t cope with.

“But in our job we have one target and we have one focus and it’s quite a nice place to work because we put all our energy into one thing, which means we can focus our minds and we can focus our energy and focus our resources.”