Cage fighter plotted £53m raid while recovering from near-fatal stabbing

"I’m going to die": Lee Murray was stabbed in the heart outside a Mayfair club. Five months later he carried out the Securitas robbery
12 April 2012

A cage fighter jailed for the £53million Securitas robbery planned the raid while recovering from an attempt on his life outside a nightclub.

Lee Murray, who has been jailed for 10 years in Morocco, was stabbed outside the Funky Buddha club in Mayfair.

The top-ranked cage fighter, nicknamed Lightning, had been at a party at the club which had attracted celebrities such as Jade Goody, Callum Best and Tottenham midfielder Jermaine Jenas.

Murray fell to the ground, crying out to his minder Paul Allen: "I've been stabbed — I'm going to die." He underwent open- heart surgery and needed 30 pints of blood but no one was charged with the attack in September 2005.

From his hospital bed Murray spent his convalescence plotting the record-breaking raid which was to take place five months later.

He had a ferocious reputation and was "feared for his fists", according to his co-conspirator Allen, and his comeback from the near-fatal stabbing added lustre to his fighting persona.

"Nobody could believe it. He had just come off his death bed, and was training so soon. People couldn't believe that this guy was back on the street," Allen said.

Allen was jailed at the Old Bailey for 18 years for his part in the robbery, admitting conspiracy to kidnap, conspiracy to commit robbery and conspiracy to possess a firearm.

Both he and Murray had fled to Morocco after the raid in Kent in February 2006. While Allen was extradited back to Britain, Murray claimed local citizenship and must serve his sentence, with no prospect of an early release, in an African prison.

The motive for the stabbing is still unclear. Speaking during his trial in September last year Allen also told the jury: "I'm not too sure what it was over, I think it was a girl or something, and one thing led to another. There were all sorts of theories. It was in the paper that Mr Big' had got Lee Murray, but nobody was ever arrested for it.

"He was almost dead. He got stabbed in the heart. The knife scraped his heart, the lung, under the armpit. The blood was running like a tap. I thought he was going to die there and then. We managed to flag a car down and jumped in with two girls, they took him to the hospital.

"The car was a write-off, the amount of blood, it was hitting the ceiling, and the insurance company wrote the car off."

Murray, whose first fight was against Katie Price's husband Alex Reid, was convinced he was on the brink of breaking into the high-earning Las Vegas international cage-fighting scene where he could command £30,000 a fight.

Allen added: "A lot of people didn't think that he was Lee Murray when they met him — they would think he was about seven foot tall, huge, but he wasn't."

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