This is the moment tourists in Dubai run as retaliatory Iranian missiles are intercepted overhead amid fears the Middle East is on the brink of all-out war. 

A short 11-second clip has emerged online showing the brief moment when Iranian airstrikes were shot out of the sky above the United Arab Emirates city. 

People were soaking up the sun beside the pool as two clouds expanded in the blue sky above. 

In the video, with over half a million views, the woman says, ‘Oh my god’ as she pans the camera across the pool and back up to two plumes of smoke in the sky while insisting, ‘They are bombing it’. 

It comes as Iran has launched revenge attacks across the Middle East in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Israel after the US and Israel targeted the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this morning.

Tehran has also hit the US’s Fifth Fleet service centre in Manama, Bahrain, and alleges to have struck several bases across Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait. Meanwhile, Iraq, Dubai and Jordan have all reported missile activity so far.  

Earlier today, Donald Trump condemned Iran’s ‘vicious’ leaders’ 47-year ‘campaign of bloodshed and mass murder’ as he vowed to ‘raze’ the country’s missile industry ‘to the ground’.

It comes as the first strike was launched on Iran, which was believed to have targeted Khamenei’s offices this morning, following weeks of knife-edge tensions between the countries. 

However, officials have said the 86-year-old, who has not been seen in public for days, is not in Tehran and has been transferred to a secure location. 

Meanwhile, Will Bailey, who is visiting Dubai, shared on his TikTok that he was ‘awoken to what seems like World War Three’ on his first day in the city. 

‘Apparently, missiles have just landed in Abu Dhabi, which is about an hour drive from Dubai,’ the Brit said. ‘I was about to go to a beach club and have a nice Saturday afternoon.’

As they listen to a radio message reiterating the British embassy was aware of strikes over the UAE, his friend joked, ‘We need to get a bottle show, it could be our last one.’

‘Go out with a bang literally,’ Will replied before nervously biting his nails as the broadcast message confirmed a second wave of missiles had been intercepted. 

‘What is happening?’ he exclaimed before his mouth was left agape following the confirmation of one death in Abu Dhabi amid the strikes. 

‘Someone’s died in Abu Dhabi,’ he tells his friend. ‘The phone is shaking as I’m holding my phone up…s**t.’

In another clip posted by @iknowuea, loud reverberating sounds can be heard as a plume of white smoke emerges as a missile is intercepted. 

A video from outside a Brewdog in the Middle Eastern city shows a second projectile being struck down in the sky. 

‘F****ng close,’ a British voice could be heard saying, while another added: ‘That’s the second one.’

Meanwhile, British influencer Leah Mai, who moved from London to Dubai, shared a short clip of the blue sky to her story following the missile interception.

‘Every so often, you get reminded that you live in the Middle East. A place where bombs do actually go off. Mad,’ she wrote. 

Elsewhere, Jamie Smith, who was drinking pints by the pool, said he heard ‘three loud bangs’.

‘Hotel is delivering complementary ice lollies like all is good, he added. ‘Well the pool and the adjoining pub are very quiet for a Saturday.’ 

It comes as blasts have also rocked Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, sparking fears the Middle East may now be on the brink of all-out war.

In Bahrain, officials confirmed that the headquarters of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet had been targeted by a missile attack – with footage shared on social media showing a large plume of smoke rising into the sky.

Explosions have also been heard in the Syrian city of Damascus and in the city of Sidon in southern Lebanon, apparently as a result of Israeli missile interceptions.

The Operation has been named ‘Lion’s Roar’ by Israel and ‘Epic Fury’ by the US Department of Defense, which Trump has renamed the Department of War. 

It is understood that the UK did not participate in the attacks, and Sir Keir Starmer will chair a meeting of the Government’s emergency Cobra committee later today.

UK citizens have been urged to shelter by the British embassy in Doha, while Qatar also warned residents via an alert to stay indoors and away from military bases.

The UK withdrew its diplomatic staff from Iran on Friday due to security worries, while staff in the British embassy in Tel Aviv and their dependents have been moved to another location by the Foreign Office. 

The UK Government said its priority is ‘the safety of UK nationals’ in the Middle East but that it is ‘ready to protect our interests’.

A Government spokesperson said: ‘Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and that is why we have continually supported efforts to reach a negotiated solution.

‘Our immediate priority is the safety of UK nationals in the region and we will provide them with consular assistance, available 24/7.

‘As part of our longstanding commitments to the security of our allies in the Middle East, we have a range of defensive capabilities in the region, which we have recently bolstered. We stand ready to protect our interests.

‘We do not want to see further escalation into a wider regional conflict.’

Meanwhile, Iran’s exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi has urged Iranians to prepare for an uprising and to take to the streets in the midst of the Islamic Republic’s collapse. 

He warned civilians to stay at home for now and to prepare to mobilise, ready for his instructions. 

Describing the US’s attacks as ‘humanitarian intervention’, he reminded security forces they had sworn to protect the Iranian people and not IS and its leaders. 

He urged that if they did not switch sides, they would ‘sink’ alongside the current regime and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. 

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also warned the Iranian regime ‘must not be armed with nuclear weapons’. 

‘My brothers and sisters, citizens of Israel, a short time ago, Israel and the United States embarked on an operation to remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran. 

He said the regime had ‘spilled our blood’, and ‘murdered many Americans, and massacred its own people.’ 

‘This murderous terrorist regime must not be armed with nuclear weapons that would allow it to threaten all of humanity,’ he said. 

‘Our joint action will create the conditions for the courageous Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.

‘The time has come for all segments of the Iranian people – the Persians, the Kurds, the Azeris, the Baluchis, and the Ahwazis – to throw off the yoke of tyranny and bring about a free and peaceful Iran.

‘Together we will stand, together we will fight, and together we will ensure the eternity of Israel.’

In Tehran, witnesses heard the first blast by Mr Khamenei’s office on Saturday morning. Iranian state television later reported the explosion, without offering a cause.

There have also been unverified reports of explosions in other locations across Iran including Isfahan, the third biggest city, and Tabriz.

More explosions struck Iran’s capital after Israel said it was attacking the country. Authorities have offered no casualty information from the strikes.

Meanwhile, Iran shut down its airspace and mobile phone services were cut as internet access dropped by over half, according to NetBlocks.

Israel has warned its own citizens to prepare to take cover if the Iranians fight back, with sirens already being heard across Israel.

The country’s Defense Force said: ‘This is a proactive alert to prepare the public for the possibility of missiles being launched toward the State of Israel.’

Airspace above Israel was closed to civilian flights following the strike this morning.

The explosions come as tensions rose between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme. 

Earlier today, Trump denounced the regime as the ‘world’s number one stage sponsor of terror’, which had recently killed ‘tens of thousands of its own people as they protested’. 

‘It has always been the police of the United States, in particular my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon,’ the US president added.

‘I will say it again. They can never have a nuclear weapon.’

‘This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the US armed forces,’ he later added. 

He then turned his address to the ‘great proud people of Iran’, saying it was their ‘hour of freedom’ that was at hand. 

Warning them to stay sheltered and at home, he urged them to ‘take’ their government after the US operation is over.  

‘This will probably be your only chance for generations,’ he said. ‘For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it.’

‘No president was willing to do what I was willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is willing to give you what you want.

‘So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. 

‘Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is in your reach. 

‘This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass. May god bless the brave men and women of America’s armed forces. 

‘May god bless the United States of America. May god bless you all.’

On the frantically busy trading room floors of Morgan Stanley’s Manhattan offices where billions of dollars change hands every day there is one perpetually quiet corner – a single desk that sits unoccupied.

It is empty because the young Wall Street executive it belongs to remains on unpaid leave – as she is working as a paramedic on the frontline of the war to save her homeland, Ukraine, from invasion by Russia.

So incredulous were colleagues of Viktoriia Honcharuk, 25, giving up her six-figure salary job as a New York investment banker to go to war that her line manager promised to keep her job open for when she changed her mind.

That was in late 2022 – and that desk remains unoccupied.

Viktoriia was moved to sign up when Vladimir Putin launched his ‘special military operation’ and brought Europe’s bloodiest war since World War Two to her homeland.

​’I thought if I don’t do something now, I won’t be able to look myself in the eyes,’ she recalls. ‘If something happens and Ukraine does not exist in a few years, how am I going to look in the mirror and say ‘I am Ukrainian’ or a person of values?

​’If you care about something, you have to act on it, otherwise it just gets worse.’

And so the banker scheduled a meeting with her boss at Morgan Stanley and told him she was going to return to Ukraine.

To her surprise, her manager was fully supportive of her move – and three years later her desk still remains in the office, ready for her whenever she wants to return.

​The banker-turned-battlefield paramedic added: ‘As soon as I went into his office, the first thing he said to me was: ‘You want to go to Ukraine, don’t you?’

​’I asked him how he knew, and he told me ‘I can see you walking in every single day to your desk, and I see your eyes, and I know you are not here, you are not here with us.’

‘Which was fair and also true. So he told me to go, figure things out, take a few months and said I am welcome to come back anytime. And I never did.’

Since leaving the shimmering skyscrapers of NYC behind in December 2022, Viktoriia has treated thousands of soldiers as well as Russian prisoners of war.

Despite starting out with a phobia of needles she has now worked across some of the war’s deadliest battlefields, including in Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

Viktoriia says that at times she has feared she would perish on the front line.

Most days she is triaging patients, who have lost legs, arms and even eyes in battle, documenting some of the gruesome injuries on her popular social media accounts.

She has also set up a think tank where she leads on defence tech, warning politicians around the world about how fibre-optic drones are changing the nature of modern warfare.

​Speaking to the Daily Mail this week about her former life of luxury in Manhattan, Viktoriia said: ‘I do miss it but my conscience couldn’t let me stay.’

The high achiever first visited the United States when she was 15-years-old as part of a young leaders exchange programme.

She later returned to attend Minerva University in San Francisco where she was enrolled in the elite international programme, that sees students travel across seven cities around the world during their study.

Viktoriia had watched from afar as Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s borders four years ago, as Vladimir Putin began his invasion.

So when the 22-year-old quit her role at Morgan Stanley to become a paramedic on the frontline – despite a phobia of blood and needles – friends in New York begged her not to go. They called her foolish.

​Her older sister, Maryna, 30, grabbed a bag and joined the resistance the day the war broke out – while her father and mother, who had previously been against women joining the army, joined the local territorial army.

‘My family is a lot more involved than most of the family’s in Ukraine,’ she previously told a YouTuber.

‘My Mum, Dad and sister all joined the armed forces at the beginning. Even my Mum, who was very against women in the army, was standing there with AK74s.

‘I was very proud of her and how my family reacted to the full scale invasion. I knew I needed to at least be as good as them.’

​Thousands of miles away, Viktoriia offered support by donating money to Ukraine’s war effort to help buy food, clothes and other supplies for soldiers. Yet she suddenly felt that this was not enough.

​She said: ‘The Ukrainian army quadrupled in a day, so people needed a lot of things, and that was making me feel that I was useful. But as time passed, what I was doing now was not enough.

​Her older sister, Maryna, who was an inspiration to Viktoriia, is one of her biggest supporters and admires how she put her Manhattan life on hold for Ukraine.

​Maryna, who was working at a television firm in Ukraine when the war broke out, told the Mail this week: ‘I actually think she is a very, very brave girl to leave her dream work and her dream life to do all this.

​’It was not a big question for me about what to do – but for her, it required a lot of thinking, and she is an overthinker. I don’t know if I would have done the same if I were in her shoes.’

Not everyone in her life, however, was so supportive. Her mother even went on hunger-strike to stop her from joinin

Speaking on the military YouTube channel NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade, she said previously: ‘My sister was always supportive of me and supports my choices because she knows I am going to do what I want anyways.

‘My dad has always been understanding but my mom not so much. She was not always supportive of my choices. For example when I went to Flex (Future Leaders Exchange Programme) she could not understand what it was.

‘So with this war she stopped eating for a few days as a sign of protest, even though she did the very same thing.

‘She’s good now and she’s supportive now. She’s learnt to support it.’

Friends in Manhattan had actively encouraged Viktoriia not to go to her war-torn country, fearing she was giving up on her career in the United States.

​’Some of my friends were not very supportive,’ she said. ‘They thought it was a very foolish idea. They had seen me trying to get the career that I had really wanted throughout the years and saw how hard it was for me to do.

​’They said I was giving up too much by doing something like this. But some were supportive and that’s what I needed.’

Viktoriia – or Tori as she is called in the military – now works in the Third Assault Brigade, the same unit her sister works in intelligence in.

​The unit is a volunteer-only unit, mostly made up of young, smart, educated Ukrainians who gave up their everyday jobs and studies at university to join the resistance.

​Seen as one of the most elite and efficient units, known for its intense training, has more than 500 people trying to sign up to join every month.

Maryna has been working in the army for four years, since the day after the war broke out. She was given a week’s training in technical medicine before being let out into the field and in those first days of war, when no one knew what lay ahead, she did not know how alone she would live.

‘When I joined, I thought I would die in three days because I didn’t know what would be happening in the next week,’ Maryna said.

‘There was no understanding on how the world would be and if Russians would come here. We didn’t know anything so my plan was to do something and if I was going to die, I would die for my country.’

Maryna, who was Ukraine’s first female assault trooper and now leads the intelligence unit in her squad, has, according to her sister, ‘the most badass job here in Ukraine’.

​The older sister captured members from the Wagner Group, who her sister says ‘couldn’t believe he had been taken prisoner by a woman’.

​When Viktoriia joined, she was given a week’s training in technical medicine before being given her first assignment.

​The sisters, who used to constantly squabble as children, are now grateful they work in the same unit and can check in on each other.

​The pair, who were brought up in Baranivka, close to the Belarus border, can hear each other chatting on the radio and know they are okay.

​’I can tell by her voice if she was tired or not, if she was scared or not, for me it was a lot more peaceful just knowing she was okay and we were getting to see each other a lot more often,’ Viktoriia said.

There are still disagreements, however. Most notably on their view of Russian prisoners of war.

Speaking of having to treat their opponents, Maryna said: ‘I see this sad little guy. This old white guy, who is so scared to say a word to you.

​’It’s not like an option [to treat them]. You don’t think he is a prisoner of war (PoW), just someone you need to help.’

But Viktoriia, who admits she is the more emotional one of the pair, said while she will always treat PoW with compassion, she finds it hard to fully disassociate from the situation.

She said: ‘I don’t feel the same way. It is hard for me not to think that these are the people that came. They could have made a different choice. They could have done something about this.

‘I was a very big believer that people are inherently good before all of this but I don’t think so anymore.

‘One of the PoW I had to treat was right after four friends were killed, right after we retrieved their bodies, and then the same night I had to pick up a PoW and change him adn I thought, really – this might be the guy who killed our friend.

‘It’s difficult because it’s something we have to do because Russians are really cruel with our prisoners of war and we are not like this, we are civilised people.’

​When she is not working as a paramedic, saving lives in often terrible conditions, Viktoriia is working on her think tank – the Snake Island Institute – which was set up in the wake of President Trump’s bust-up with President Zelensky in the Oval Office.

​The think tank aims to represent Ukraine’s military experience in the international arena, communicated by those actively working in units, rather than purely through politicians.

It has led to Viktoriia speaking in the US, in London and last week at the Munich Security Conference about various issues from defence technology to building better partnerships with allies.

​’Often, certain messages about Ukraine’s military experience do not get across in the way it needs to,’ she said.

‘We saw this urgent need to create something that is independent and that can communicate our Ukrainian military experience to our Western allies.

So we started the Snake Island Institute as an emergency think tank with the goals to aggregate Ukrainian military experience and use it to position Ukraine as a partner.

‘Ukraine has so much to offer. President Trump wants a deal, let’s have a deal, right? The deal is we help you, you help us.’

And it’s not just the United States Viktoriia wants to send a message too – it is also to the UK and the rest of their allies in Europe, who she believes are simply not prepared for the threat of war.

​’You guys [the UK] are not ready to fight anyone and you need to be,’ she said bluntly.

​’In Ukraine, we are really interested in you guys [Europe] being strong as you are our allies.

‘It is not a race between the allies; we should be one big allied association.’

The work the sisters have done over the past few years has seen them being made poster-girls for the Ukrainian army – even being painted by the British war artist Max Denison-Pender.

A portrait of Viktoriia sitting in a ruined tank in the city of Bakhmut in 2023 hangs in the reception of the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham, as an inspiration to British troops.

​She has spoken at Sandhurst and spoke at the Munich Security Conference last week about how fibre optic drones are changing the face of warfare.

Viktoriia has been depicted as a role model to many in Ukraine, and around Europe as a whole and while she was initially proud of this, it comes at a price which weighs on her conscience.

​’I thought it was cool at first until the first girl I knew who I was inspired to join went into the army and was killed,’ she said. ‘I felt very uneasy about it.’

​’That is the hardest part, the hardest part is to see people die,’ she adds.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion four years ago, at least 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since 24 February 2022 according to President Zelensky, however, the estimated figure is expected to be higher.

Amongst the pictures of herself surrounded by friends in the army, there are several tributes to close friends of Viktoriia who have died in the war.

​And as for her return to Manhattan, Viktoriia does not know what the future holds. Her desk remains open for her at any point she does decide to return, but for now, she is focused on creating a stronger Ukraine.

Israel and the United States have launched a daylight missile attack on Iran following weeks of knife-edge tensions building up between Donald Trump and the Ayatollah. 

The first apparent strike happened near the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday morning with thick smoke seen rising into the sky. 

However, officials said the 86-year-old, who has not been seen in public for days, is not in Tehran and has been transferred to a secure location. 

There are also unverified reports that others locations in Iran including Isfahan and  Tabriz have been hit. 

President Trump said in a video on Truth Social that the United States had begun ‘major combat operations’ in Iran.

‘Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime,’ he said. 

Iran said there would be a ‘crushing response’ and warned that American military personnel and bases spread across the region would be targets for any retaliation. 

Israeli defence minister Israel Katz described the attack as being done ‘to remove threats’.

Several hospitals in Israel launched their emergency protocols, including moving patients and surgeries to underground facilities.

In Tehran, witnesses heard the first blast by Mr Khamenei’s office. Iranian state television later reported the explosion, without offering a cause.

Sirens sounded across Israel at the same time as it closed its air space. The Israeli military said it had issued a ‘proactive alert to prepare the public for the possibility of missiles being launched toward the state of Israel’.

More explosions struck Iran’s capital after Israel said it was attacking the country. Authorities have offered no casualty information from the strikes.

Meanwhile, Iran shut down its air space and mobile phone services were cut.

Israel has warned its own citizens to prepare to take cover if the Iranians fight back, with sirens already being heard across Israel.

The country’s Defense Force said: ‘This is a proactive alert to prepare the public for the possibility of missiles being launched toward the State of Israel.’ 

Airspace above Israel was closed to civilian flights following the strike this morning.

More explosions struck Iran’s capital after Israel said it was attacking the country. Authorities have offered no casualty information from the strikes. 

The explosions come as tensions are high between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme. 

This week Trump made the grave warning that Iran is manufacturing weapons that could soon strike US.

Tehran is ‘working on missiles that will soon reach’ America, Trump said during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. He also vowed to prevent Iran, the ‘number one sponsor of terrorism,’ from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Trump has openly flirted with regime change too, telling reporters recently that the ousting of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ‘would be the best thing that could happen.’

But US intelligence reports have not yet concluded that Iran is capable of crafting a weapon capable of reaching the homeland.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessed last year that Iran could need until 2035 to create a ‘militarily viable’ intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) – the kind that travels thousands of miles, including, for a time, through space before the warhead plummets towards its target.

‘Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability,’ the DIA report states.

Two aircraft carrier strike groups – representing around 15,000 soldiers, over a dozen ships, hundreds of planes and likely some submarines – are being used by Trump to get Iran to capitulate to his denuclearization demands.

In addition, many thousands of troops and scores of military assets are on bases throughout the region, though there are some reports of evacuations.

The stalemate has recently shown some signs of traction with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, with chief Iran negotiator Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, Oman’s foreign minister. 

Additional meetings were scheduled for Friday. 

The heated tensions this year come just months after Operation Midnight Hammer – one of the most sophisticated military aviation successes in recent American history.

Last June, Trump’s B-2 Stealth Bombers were flown to Iran in a 37-hour secret mission to quell the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear capabilities. 

Two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles hit Iran in the operation.

Their purpose was to neutralize Iranian defense systems protecting nuclear enrichment facilities at Isfahan. When these sites had been destroyed, the B-2 group entered Iranian airspace.

The stealth jet squadron slipped into enemy skies, moving into attack formation at ‘high altitude and high speed’, with lighter, more mobile F-22 fighter jets sweeping in front of the B-2s to shield them from any surface-to-air or air-to-air fire.

There was none. Not a single shot was fired at any of the aircraft or warships involved in Midnight Hammer from the beginning of the operation to its end.

Уряд продовжує комплекс заходів, який дасть змогу підвищити прозорість цін і змогу людям обирати найвигідніший варіант. На цьому наголосила Прем’єр­міністр Юлія Свириденко. Вона повідомила, що відтепер разом е­рецептом з’явиться інформація про три найдешевші варіанти потрібних ліків у Національному каталозі цін. Ця функція буде доступна у вигляді QR­коду на паперовій пам’ятці до е­рецепта, яку можна отримати в лікаря.

«Це допоможе підібрати ліки відповідно до свого бюджету і не доплачувати за бренд. У каталозі ви побачите всі доступні препарати з тією самою діючою речовиною, дозуванням і формою випуску, а також три варіанти препаратів за найнижчою ціною. Щонайменше один із цих варіантів обов’язково має бути в наявності в будь­якій аптеці», — наголосила Юлія Свириденко.

На першому етапі така можливість доступна для однокомпонентних рецептурних ліків у формі таблеток і капсул, які купують за власні кошти. Надалі рішення буде масштабуватися на інші препарати, повідомляє Департамент інформації та комунікацій з громадськістю Секретаріату КМУ.

At the sound of the first shots, Eileen Harrild, a PE teacher at Dunblane Primary School, turned toward the door. She was surrounded by a group of excited five-year-olds in white T-shirts and shorts, about to start the first class of the day.

Instead, she saw Thomas Hamilton walk into the gym with a gun in his hand.

‘He did not pause or speak, he just continued walking straight towards me, looking at me. He pointed his gun at me and shot me,’ she was to recall.

‘The first shot hit me on my right forearm. There was a terrible noise of continual firing. He started to spray shots everywhere.’

Wounded in the arm, hand and chest, she staggered towards the gym store cupboard while trying to usher children to safety.

As she did so, Hamilton, who was wearing a woolly hat and ear defenders, turned and fired repeatedly at Year 1’s class teacher, Gwen Mayor.

A bullet pierced her right eye, killing her instantly. She had been standing near to – and perhaps shielding – pupil Emma Crozier, who was also shot dead.

Children were screaming as the room filled with gunfire. Mrs Harrild stumbled towards the storeroom, clutching her bloody arms across her chest. She had lost her glasses. A small group of children followed. They had also been shot but, incredibly, were still able to move.

Teaching assistant Mary Blake, wounded in both legs, somehow struggled to her feet and also began to shepherd the children in front of her to the storeroom. Others ran around hysterically, while classmates were already lying on the bloodied gym floor.

Amy Hutchison, a little girl who had been arguing with her mother over which boots to wear that frosty morning, remembered skipping in plimsolls when her legs turned to jelly and she fell to the floor, having been shot multiple times. She somehow dragged herself to the gym cupboard.

Classmate Coll Austin was shot in the foot but still managed to follow Mrs Harrild and Mrs Blake. Limping and struggling towards the storeroom door, he was shot again, this time in the back, then fell face first on to the gym floor.

It is 30 years since the massacre on March 13, 1996, at Dunblane, a quiet town in central Scotland. But what happened that Wednesday morning remains deeply shocking.

In a few horrifying minutes, 43-year-old Hamilton killed 16 children and a teacher, and wounded 15 others before turning the gun on himself. It remains Britain’s worst mass shooting.

The massacre of children not only devastated the lives of their families but changed Britain itself by igniting a fierce political and public debate about gun laws.

During his killing spree, Hamilton fired 105 bullets from guns that were legally held, despite a history of complaints to police about his odd behaviour.

The Snowdrop Campaign, set up in the wake of the murders, gathered more than 700,000 signatures and later ushered in an almost total ban on privately held handguns.

Memories of what took place in Dunblane are still vivid. As a writer and documentary producer, I have covered the story over many years – speaking to witnesses, those who lost loved ones, politicians, police officers and people who knew the killer – and digging deep into the national archives for witness statements that crucially help to construct a complete picture of what happened.

Headteacher Ron Taylor was in his office when he heard a ‘burst of three or four bangs’ in the distance. He assumed it must be construction work that he hadn’t been informed about. He looked out of the window and into the playground but couldn’t see anything. The noise seemed to be getting louder.

As he stood up to investigate, his deputy pushed open the door. She was crouched down with a look of terror on her face, her eyes wide open. ‘Somebody’s in the school with a gun. Get down.’

At around the same time the previous morning, Mr Taylor had been going through the school mail in his small office.

One of the envelopes he opened contained a photocopy of a letter from Hamilton to ‘Her Majesty the Queen’, complaining that he had been badly treated by the Scout Association in Scotland (which had dropped him as an aspiring Scout master years before). He said this had done ‘untold damage’ to his reputation and asked the Queen to intervene.

Mr Taylor had met Hamilton a couple of times and considered him a troublesome crank. He showed the letter briefly to a colleague, then set it aside.

Hamilton certainly was an oddity, an increasingly scruffy loner who had been running after-school clubs and summer camps for boys in several nearby Scottish towns for many years.

‘Mr Hamilton’, as he was known to the children, cut a stern and forbidding figure, quick to bark orders or slap them for minor misdemeanours.

Boys at the club practised football or did gymnastics. Hamilton told people he was a qualified gymnastics instructor and his boys were expected to undertake ‘strenuous’ exercise – usually wearing just skimpy black trunks he supplied.

Parents had been complaining about him sporadically to police since the 1970s – about the lack of safety equipment on his sailing trips and summer camps, the terrible food, his poor organisation, and his unsettling habit of taking hundreds of photographs of the boys in his care.

Rumours about his unhealthy interest in boys swirled – but as no boy ever complained of Hamilton touching him, he was able to stay on the right side of the law.

Indeed, when George Robertson, a Dunblane resident and Labour MP, tried to shut down one of Hamilton’s clubs, Dunblane Rovers, in 1983, he was countered by a petition signed by 70 parents, which ended: ‘We are proud to have Mr Hamilton in charge of our boys.’ Hamilton fought every complaint, but slowly, his life began to unravel.

In the months leading up to the shooting, he lost his means of income when a trading standards ruling stopped him buying and selling camera equipment.

He took solace in practising at a shooting range. He already possessed an impressive arsenal as he had been fascinated with guns since he was a teenager. He began buying bullets in large quantities: 1,700 rounds of 9mm and 500 rounds of .357 ammunition.

The day before the shooting – and just hours after Mr Taylor had opened the copy of his odd letter to the Queen – Hamilton had made his way to a car-hire centre in Stirling and asked to hire a van for a single day.

His manner was memorable. ‘He unnerved me quite a bit… the way he spoke, mainly,’ the receptionist said later.

‘He spoke very slowly, very clearly, precisely, but with no emotion or expression. There was just nothing, nothing in there.

You couldn’t have held a conversation with him.’

Hamilton then paid a visit to his mother at her home, where he had a cup of tea and a hot bath.

On the morning of March 13, he was up early. A neighbour saw him scraping ice from the windscreen of his hired white van. He then went back into his flat, where the telephone directory sat on a glass-topped coffee table, open at the page containing the telephone number and address of Dunblane Primary School.

His spare gun magazines and more than 700 rounds of ammunition were packed into two canvas camera bags.

He pulled on four leather holsters and secured his guns: Two 9mm Browning semi-automatic pistols, one with an extra-long barrel, and two .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolvers, only marginally less powerful than the .44 Magnum used by Clint Eastwood in the 1971 film Dirty Harry.

The drive to the school took 20 minutes. The traffic had begun to ease after the morning rush.

He got out of the van, walked to a wooden telephone pole and cut the wires at its base. Then he walked up the driveway towards the school.

By the time Mary Blake made it to the storeroom, Mrs Harrild and three children were already inside. Two children lay badly wounded outside.

Mrs Harrild and Mrs Blake tried to hush the children by putting their fingers over their lips. A little boy kept repeating, ‘What a bad man… what a bad man… what a bad man.’ Amy Hutchison began to cry for her mother.

Outside, they heard the creak of footsteps. There was a period of deadly silence, followed by the punch of rapid gunshots.

Mrs Blake could feel blood running down her neck and an agonising pain in her legs. Through a gap in the door, she could see children outside in the gym hall, ‘screaming and wailing’.

This went on for around three minutes, but to Mrs Harrild, Mrs Blake and the children in the cupboard it felt like a lifetime.

‘It seemed to last forever,’ Mrs Harrild later recalled.

‘We just lay there on the floor, helpless, just waiting for him to come round the corner and finish us off… I wasn’t feeling any pain. It was as if I was anaesthetised.’

The air in the gym was thick with smoke and the acrid smell of cordite. Bullet casings littered the floor.

There were splintered bullet holes in the wooden floor and white flecks of plaster breaking off the walls.

Hamilton pushed open the fire doors and started shooting at one of the huts used by Year 7 pupils.

He then stepped back inside the gym and walked back across the varnished floor to where Coll Austin was lying in a pool of blood.

The boy could see the gunman’s boots as he approached. Aware that he was still alive, Hamilton shot him once more in the back. Incredibly, Coll would survive and recover.

A few seconds later, Hamilton turned his fire on himself.

From its leather holster he pulled out his .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum, a weapon he had owned for almost 20 years, put the black barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The bullet passed through his skull, bounced off the stone wall behind and fell clinking to the wooden floor.

When Mr Taylor reached the gym door, he could hear children crying. What he saw as he burst through the door was almost impossible to comprehend. He recalled: ‘It was a scene of unimaginable carnage, one’s worst nightmare.’

At his feet lay the body of Gwen Mayor and, lying partially across her, was Emma Crozier, a little girl he recognised. Both were obviously dead.

Looking along the full length of the gym hall, Mr Taylor saw a group of injured children close to the storeroom entrance. In the centre, close to the climbing ropes, a silent group of children lay on a gym mat, huddled together. They all appeared to be dead.

In a state of shock, Mr Taylor shouted for staff to call for ambulances. He was briefly unaware of the arrival of John Currie, the school janitor, who walked towards where Hamilton lay with his right hand still twitching.

Mr Taylor shouted to Mr Currie that the gunman was still alive. He could also see a handgun on the floor and, afraid the killer might reach for it, shouted to Mr Currie to kick the gun away.

Mr Currie also spotted that Hamilton still had the Smith & Wesson Magnum in his left hand, so he reached down and prised it from his grip. He threw it across the gym, where it bounced and landed near the fire exit.

As he was throwing the handgun, a voice behind them shouted for him to leave the gun.

It was an off-duty police officer who had dropped his child at the school’s nursery only minutes before. He had been standing with his son when a teacher ran past and said there had been a shooting, and set off running through the corridors.

The officer told Mr Taylor to put pressure on the gunshot wounds and to find some rags or clothes or anything else to hand.

The headteacher ran to the shower room opposite the assembly hall stage and grabbed as many green paper towels as he could.

Noticing that two young girls in the group in the centre of the gym were still breathing, he pushed the paper towels against the bullet wound in one girl’s back, but he saw that she also had serious bullet wounds to her chest. She died in his arms.

He then went to the left side of the gym, where three young boys and a girl were lying. One boy’s arms were moving, but he had a bullet wound to his head. Mr Taylor could see no way to help. All he could do was say sorry and move on.

Next, he went to a young boy who was lying on his back with his hand holding his wounded shoulder, whimpering quietly. He passed him some paper towels and told the child to hold them tight against his wounds.

When Mr Taylor next stood up to look around, he noticed the storeroom, where he found Mary Blake, Eileen Harrild and the children. He gave them paper towels and assured them that help was on its way.

It was then that the first two uniformed police officers from the local station in Dunblane entered the school and ran down the corridors towards the gym.

A call from one of them to a senior officer was recorded. When asked how many were dead, he replied ‘Eh, several, over a dozen – it’s Tommy Hamilton. He’s a f****n’ nutter.’

Meanwhile, panic was spreading in the nearby streets as news of the shooting leaked out.

Anxious parents began gathering at the school gate, among them Judy Murray, then a part-time tennis coach. She had been helping in her mother’s toy shop that morning when a colleague told her the radio was reporting a shooting at Dunblane Primary School.

Her two sons, Jamie, ten, and Andy, eight – both future Wimbledon champions – were pupils at the school. As well as being tennis mad, the boys were football fans and, for a time, had attended the boys’ club at Dunblane High School run by Thomas Hamilton. On occasion, Judy would give Hamilton a lift to the station.

It would be much later in the day before the identity of the killer was confirmed but it was already common knowledge on the streets of Dunblane. Judy pulled the car over on the way home – as the boys knew Hamilton, she didn’t want them to hear it from anyone else.

After she broke the news, Jamie remained quiet. He would never speak of it again. Andy wanted to know why Hamilton hadn’t just killed himself. Later, he would think about how a man capable of mass murder had been in the family car, sitting next to his mum.

No one will ever know exactly how or why Hamilton began planning his attack on the school. He spoke to no one about it and left no note.

At the inquiry into the shooting, Professor David Cooke, a forensic psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, probably came nearest to an explanation.

Having reviewed all the evidence, he said he believed the shooting had been planned for months and was directed at the community as an act of revenge. ‘One of the most powerful ways of getting back at people is to kill their children,’ he added.

The families, in their grief, were determined that something positive would come from their loss – that never again should anyone be able to carry out a mass murder using lawfully held weapons.

They would have a long and fierce fight on their hands against Britain’s powerful gun lobby.

They also insisted the authorities take a long look at Hamilton’s troubled history. Could he – should he – have been stopped?

• Adapted from One Morning In March by Stephen McGinty (Swift Press, £22), to be published March 12. © Stephen McGinty 2026. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 15/03/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

Enemy searchlights raked the sky and shells exploded around us: the cockpit was filled with blinding light, so I could see nothing ahead and was forced to fly on instruments. 

These bastards were intent on our destruction.

It was night-time, September 1944. Navigator Doug Redmond and I had just bombed Hanover, a major industrial city about 180 miles west of Berlin.

This was our first taste of war and so far, we’d encountered hardly any anti-aircraft fire. 

With the optimism of a 23-year-old, I had begun to think this job might not be so bad. 

I hadn’t bargained on terror prompting the kind of stupid mistakes which made a crew’s first few raids so dangerous.

Doug was easily the best navigator in the squadron, but he had somehow ended up routing us over a German naval base. Now they were onto us. 

Our aeroplane shuddered as a shell detonated nearby and next it was my turn to make an error. Panicking, I slammed the throttle open and threw us into a vertical dive.

It got us out of the searchlight’s beam, so I could see again, but now the earth was hurtling towards us at colossal speed.

Closing the throttle, I tried to ease back on the control column. It didn’t move. Our speed and rate of descent were increasing. 

I pulled hard on the stick with all my strength. Still nothing.

Now it was a question of which would come first: the plane breaking up, or hitting the ground?

The roar of the slipstream filled the cockpit. Instinctively, I reached for the trim wheel, which fine-tuned the position of the nose. 

Winding it back as far as I could, I hauled again on the stick. 

Slowly and gratefully, we came back into level flight.

‘Turn 50 degrees starboard.’ His voice icily calm, Doug was back on the case.

‘Fifty degrees starboard,’ I said with equal calm – though I didn’t feel it – as I banked right.

We sat in silence as we climbed back up to operational height.

‘You know what?’ I said eventually. ‘I’m beginning to think that this business might be a bit bloody dangerous after all.’

The aeroplane I had the good fortune to be flying that night was a de Havilland DH98 Mosquito.

 Known as the Wooden Wonder, it was then the world’s fastest operational aircraft.

It still seems incredible that you could create something so strong and durable from a mixture of wood and glue, and that this structure could carry a pair of Rolls-Royce Merlin engines producing upwards of 1,300 horsepower each. Yet it worked brilliantly.

Flying one was like flying a Ferrari. 

I’m 105 next week – one of only a handful of Bomber Command still living – and I still remember the tremendous punch in the back you got from the speed as it hurtled down the runway.

It may seem surprising that I am only now putting my wartime experience down on paper, but I led a busy professional life as a chartered surveyor until I retired at the age of 98.

I think it’s worth recalling now as it’s important to remind ourselves what we were fighting for during the Second World War. 

You have to stand up to bullies. Despots attack weak nations and democracies, and it feels now that those same evil forces are abroad once again.

The Mosquitos used by the Light Night Striking Force (LNSF), of which we were part, had no ordnance other than four 500lb bombs, which allowed them to achieve a top speed of 420mph.

The Messerschmitt Me 109, our most frequent opponent, was 40mph slower, and German pilots who succeeded in taking down a Mosquito were awarded not just one but two kills. 

That gives you an idea of the enemy’s respect for the aeroplane.

Not that bombing raids in the Mosquito were exactly hazard- free. On your bombing run, you had to hold a steady course and, for roughly the last 10 miles, take whatever they were throwing at you. 

Slowed to 200mph, this translated into about three minutes of running the gauntlet. Not long if you are waiting for a bus, but a bloody lifetime when you know that you are in somebody’s sights.

Apart from worrying about the reception we would receive from the Germans, we also knew our station commander had refused the manufacturer’s request to ground our planes for six weeks to rectify a potential engine fault.

‘This is an operational squadron,’ he said. ‘There can be no question of grounding aircraft. Not for six days, let alone for six weeks.’

When someone then asked what we were supposed to do if our engines failed on take-off, his reply was unequivocal. ‘You die like an officer and a gentleman.’

Die you certainly would. 

A fully bombed and fuelled-up Mosquito stood no chance of recovery if it lost an engine on take-off, as happened to one of our Canadian pilots. 

Of the 30-odd aircrew I shared the mess with during my six months with 608 Squadron, a unit within the LNSF, 13 were dead by the time I left.

When the war broke out, I was living at home with my parents in London, having just begun my training as a chartered surveyor.

Aged 18, I went almost immediately to the local recruiting office to volunteer for the RAF.

I’d dreamed of learning to fly since my father, a civil servant, took me and my elder brother Kenneth to Croydon Airport to watch the arrival of Charles A. Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis following his successful solo crossing of the Atlantic.

This was in May 1927 and I was six at the time. Could I be the last person alive to have been there on that day? I suppose I might be.

With my application to become a pilot accepted, I was desperate to get to grips with the enemy. 

But instead, I was sent to the US as part of a scheme to train British military aircrew alongside their American counterparts.

I was ordered to stay on as a flying instructor, so it wasn’t until September 1944 that I finally joined 608 Squadron at RAF Downham Market in Norfolk.

Our mission was to conduct frequent, low-impact but high-value raids on Germany. As junior officers, we were housed in freezing Nissen huts, 12 of us in each. At 7.30am, we were woken with a pint mug of tea. 

After breakfast, you learned whether you were going on a raid that night. Mornings were spent inspecting our planes and afternoons whiled away gambling on dice games, or playing rugby, football and cricket.

I always flew with Doug as my navigator and bomb-aimer. Five years older than me, he was a Canadian who’d worked as a lumberjack before the war, and he was somewhat solitary with little sense of humour. 

What mattered to me was that he was good at his job.

A typical night sortie took off at around 9pm. Just before we were picked up from the mess, the squadron leader appeared to wish us good luck. 

There was little talk in the lorry taking us to dispersal – the odd bawdy remark, but nothing about what lay ahead.

En route, we stopped at the store to collect our parachutes, helmets and a snack for the trip – cocoa in a thermos and some sandwiches.

‘Not bloody spam again!’ was the invariable cry as we headed towards our Mosquitos. The planes were short on creature comforts. 

Even getting into the cramped cockpit was difficult, especially when encumbered by your Mae West life jacket (named after the voluptuous film star of the era because, when inflated, it made you look as buxom as she).

People often ask whether I carried a mascot, a teddy bear or something. Yes, I did. My mascot was a Smith & Wesson revolver with 20 rounds of ammunition.

At this time, Hitler and Goebbels were encouraging the German population to lynch downed airmen. 

My intention, if caught, was to shoot at least half a dozen members of any approaching mob before blowing my brains out.

This is the hard reality of war. 

There are many now who say they have reservations about the kind of bombing we were involved with under the direction of Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, commander-in- chief of RAF Bomber Command – which targeted Germany’s industrial capability and tried to destroy the morale of its civilian workforce by bombing cities.

Now there is certainly an argument to be had about this, but I do often wonder how that argument would go if we had lost the war. 

People might be expressing reservations about living as slave labourers under a Nazi regime, with concentration camps set up in every city for its opponents.

So, when people say, ‘What about Dresden?’ I reply that Dresden was indeed horrific. 

But so too was the blitzing of London, Coventry, Plymouth, Exeter, Liverpool and Southampton, to name but a few. 

What people tend to forget is that, between 1939 and 1945, we were in conflict with the entire German nation, the most industrious, tractable, inventive, fierce and martial race in the world.

I do not mean that the German people themselves were evil. Not at all. But those ruling them at the time undoubtedly were.

As to the ethics of our ‘area bombing’, Harris’s insight was that, from the perspective of prosecuting war, there was no moral difference between the chap who drove the tank and the chap – or chappess – who built it. 

Both were intent on our destruction. As a result of his bombing campaign, vast numbers of people and huge quantities of equipment were locked down and kept from the front line.

As for us pilots, you could turn down a mission if you had doubts about the aeroplane – something not working, for example – or if you had a medical condition, like a cold, but to refuse too often would see you accused of LMF: lack of moral fibre. 

This was a serious matter, which could lead to demotion, loss of your wings and your service records being stamped with a large red W for ‘waverer’.

This was the warning given to one pilot who had twice ducked out of going up and was in a terrible funk on the night of his next scheduled mission. 

‘I’m not coming back tonight,’ he kept saying. ‘I just know I’m not coming back.’

We did our best to tell him otherwise, but he was clearly in the grip of terrible fear. 

That night, he crashed on landing back at the airbase, killing both himself and his navigator. It was almost as if he wanted to prove that his worries had been justified. Every sortie was thoroughly unnerving. 

There is nothing good that can be said about being shot at. It isn’t exhilarating, exciting or fun in any way. Just ask any bloody pheasant.

Some of the worst anti-aircraft fire we took was on our seventh raid, over Berlin. It must have missed knocking us out of the sky by inches and hurled us at least a hundred feet upwards. 

The cockpit filled with the stench of cordite and then both engines lost power. ‘JESUS!’ bellowed Doug. ‘What do we do now?’

As the propellers windmilled silently, we rapidly lost height. Six months seemed to pass when, without so much as a cough… Hallelujah! The reassuring thrum of the engines as they came back to life. 

At once, I put the aeroplane into a steep, diving turn to escape a searchlight’s conical beam.

‘You weren’t frightened, were you, Doug?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t frightened… I was bloody terrified.’ So was I. And we’d have been a lot more frightened still had we been aware of the damage to the plane.

The next morning, as I surveyed the fuselage, a mass of holes and splinters resembling a colander, one of the fitters held out two slivers of shrapnel, each several inches long. 

‘They were embedded in the parachute you were sitting on, sir.’

My cushion, in other words – and uncomfortably close to my vital assets. Of course, every raid was just as awful for my wife, Kath.

We married in July 1943 and our daughter Vivienne was born in September 1944, during my first ops with 608 Squadron. 

By then, I’d persuaded the authorities that I should be allowed to live off-station and found us a top-floor flat with a small window looking directly onto the main runway.

Peering nervously out as our planes came back, Kath just had to hope that I was among them. 

Neither of us knew then that we would be married for more than 70 years. 

The waiting and the uncertainty must have been hell.

My penultimate raid, in March 1945, was on Berlin and it contained without question the most alarming 15 minutes of my whole time with Bomber Command.

For several weeks there had been reports of a new machine in the Luftwaffe’s inventory. 

We didn’t know much about the Me 262 jet fighter, just that it had at least 100mph on us and attacked when you were most vulnerable, during your bombing run, when you were doing your damnedest to follow your navigator’s instructions and could easily overlook the little white light that would come on when your radar equipment detected an enemy intercept.

Now I was lining up. ‘BOMBS GONE! Bombs gone!’ I said, before closing the doors.

 Maintaining height, I banked away sharply. Now home! But that white light… It was on! Not flashing. Unambiguously on.

‘CHRIST!’ yelled Doug, startled, as I stood the aeroplane on its wing and shoved the nose down. ‘What’s that all about?’

‘INTERCEPT! INTERCEPT!’ I shouted as I threw us into a steep descent. 

If it was a Focke-Wulf 190, he would have only one chance of hitting us. He’d aim to dive below and behind, then fire as he zoomed up. 

That gave him a two-second window.

If it was a jet, it was a different story. You had to hope, because he was going so fast, he’d overshoot. 

The light went out. But, hang on! It was on again! It was an Me 262, for sure.

Only one option: a banking dive as low as I dared go. Jets were thirsty at low level, so my idea was to drag him down while weaving in tight, high-speed turns until he ran short of fuel.

Down we went. The light went out. Seconds ticked by. In the end he must have decided to go home rather than risk putting down somewhere in the dark.

My last raid, again on Berlin, took place on March 3, 1945, just before my 24th birthday. 

Two days later, the Mosquito we had flown that night was shot down. Both crew members were killed. 

Those losses – and many others – remind me every day of just how bloody lucky I was.

• From Bloody Dangerous by Colin Bell (Abacus, £22), to be published on March 5. Order a copy for £19.80 (valid to 15/03/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) at www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

The early months of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022 saw her second, and allegedly favourite, son Andrew get himself into quite a pickle.

A lawsuit filed against the then-Prince by an alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein named Virginia Giuffre had for months been wending its way through the US courts.

It revolved around an explosive allegation: that Giuffre had, at the age of 17, been trafficked around the world to have three sexual encounters with the middle-aged royal, which he denied.

Andrew hired a team of lawyers to fight back. They petitioned the New York court to dismiss the ‘baseless claim’.

But the judge refused, announcing that he instead wanted the matter to proceed to a full trial, in front of a jury.

The stage was, in other words, set for a blockbuster trial, in which both Giuffre and the prince would be grilled in excruciating detail about their private lives and sexual histories.

For Andrew, who (despite photographic evidence to the contrary) had thus far insisted that he was unable to recall ever having met his accuser, it was a moment of extreme peril. He was scheduled to spend at least two full days being cross-examined under the glare of the global media.

Buckingham Palace quite understandably viewed this prospect with horror.

Then, on the afternoon of February 15, the problem suddenly went away. Out of the blue, the prince announced that he’d reached an out-of-court settlement with Miss Giuffre.

A trial was averted. And the Queen’s jubilee year saved. But controversy has dogged the settlement ever since, with critics characterising it as (to quote an MP during a Parliamentary debate this week) a grubby back-room deal in which up to £12million in ‘hush-money’ was paid to silence an alleged victim ofsex abuse.

Here are the unanswered questions that still surround this disturbingly murky chapter in Royal history…

Where does the £12m figure come from?

In short, no one knows. Neither the terms of the settlement, nor the amount it ended up costing Andrew, were ever officially disclosed. And inquiries to both Royal press officers and Giuffre’s spin-doctors about the matter continue to go unanswered.

Perhaps the most widely quoted figure – that whopping £12million – was first reported by The Telegraph, a few hours after the deal was announced.

Its accompanying article stated that the Queen had agreed to contribute a portion of the sum, using ‘income from her private Duchy of Lancaster estate, which recently increased by £1.5million to more than £23million a year’.

Whether that number is accurate is, however, anyone’s guess. As is how the total amount might have been broken down between compensation for Giuffre, a donation to her charity, and the cost of each side’s legal fees.

The terms of any payment are similarly opaque. It’s possible that an agreed sum was paid straight away, with further cash handed over in instalments. But that hasn’t stopped news outlets drawing their own conclusions.

In August 2022, The Sun was reporting that the actual settlement was ‘far less’ than £12million and could be ‘as low as £3million’. 

The Times seemed to agree: it reported in early 2023 that while pundits had initially put the amount at ‘about £10million’, that figure was now considered wide of the mark because ‘insiders have since said the total amount was nearer £3million’.

Media outlets have, however, reverted back to the £12million figure in recent days.

Could Andrew afford it?

Mystery has always surrounded Andrew’s wealth. An acquaintance once compared him to a ‘hot air balloon’ telling the Daily Mail: ‘He seems to float serenely around, in very rarefied circles, without any visible means of support. No one has ever had a clue how he pays for it.’

For most of the 2000s, he lived like a billionaire, maintaining endless staff plus a large household while relentlessly travelling the world, often via private jet.

Yet despite also managing to acquire an extensive collection of wristwatches – including several Rolexes and Cartiers, a £12,000 gold Apple Watch and a £150,000 Patek Philippe – as well as a small fleet of luxury cars (including a green Bentley) his only official income came via a small Navy pension of about £20,000, plus the £249,000 annual stipend he received from the Queen before being forced to retire from Royal duty.

This does not, to put it mildly, suggest that he’d be able to get his hands on millions of pounds to settle an awkward legal battle.

Yet Andrew has for years pursued a potentially lucrative secret career as a sort of professional ‘fixer’, using his Royal status and contacts book to help grease the wheels of commerce in corners of the world where who you know, in business, remains as important as what you know.

He also maintained potentially lucrative links to a raft of wealthy benefactors, including offshore banker David ‘Spotty’ Rowland, once dubbed ‘shady’ in the House of Commons, and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The question of what he did to repay their generosity is now being pored over by Scotland Yard.

What about his assets?

At the time of the settlement, it was reported that Andrew was meeting his financial obligations by selling his Swiss ski chalet in Verbier. 

But the sale had not been completed when the deal with Giuffre was reached and it was subsequently claimed that it would not raise the necessary funds because the property was saddled with mortgage debt.

There were other complications. Andrew and Fergie originally bought Chalet Helora directly from French businesswoman Isabelle de Rouvre, who agreed to sell it to them for £18million rather than place it on the market because they had previously rented it from her. But they only paid her £13million upfront.

The remaining £5million was to be paid in instalments, with interest. By 2021, this had still not been paid, and with the then-Duke and Duchess of York owing a total of £6.8million, Ms De Rouvre threatened legal action. 

She eventually settled for just £3.4million, in part because she believed the couple were short of money. In other words, Andrew did not appear to have sufficient property wealth to fund a large legal settlement.

Andrew’s other historic asset had been Sunninghill House, the former marital home he sold to a Kazakh chum for £15million – £3million above the asking price – in 2007.

Some of the proceeds of that sale helped fund the ski chalet purchase. The rest are likely to have been used to pay off debts arising from the £7.5million he’d spent doing up Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s former pile, in 2003, under a deal that saw him also pay £1million rent up front.

Did the bank of Mum and Dad help out?

In February 2022, it was widely reported that much of the settlement was being paid by the Queen.

Earlier this month, that plot thickened. The Sun claimed that her contribution amounted to £7million. But it also suggested that the money came in the form of a loan, which has yet to be repaid.

As to the rest, it was further suggested that Prince Philip’s estate helped to fund £3million of the settlement.

Philip died aged 99 in 2021 and his will, in keeping with royal convention, was ‘sealed’ ensuring it would remain secret for 90 years. Such secrecy was greeted with outrage and there were legal attempts by the Guardian to challenge the ruling, which failed.

How Philip would view part of his reported £30million inheritance being used by his son as ‘hush money’ has been a topic of conversation in London’s smarter clubs and in military circles.

What about King Charles?

Among other suggestions it has been claimed that Charles, then Prince of Wales, coughed up £1.5million towards the settlement. This contribution, too, was said to have been in the form of a loan.

Friends of the King have previously suggested that Charles provided no financial contribution at all, adding that elements of the loan narrative are ‘false’. 

One told us: ‘If the suggestions are that the King agreed to chip in, they are wrong. He wanted nothing to do with it and he had no agency at the time it was drawn up.’

What instead seems to have occurred is more complicated: the settlement , we understand, was to be paid in instalments, and at least one portion remained outstanding when the Queen died in 2022. 

Although Charles was not party to the original deal, he felt obliged to honour his mother’s commitment to sort it out. 

‘The details of the settlement remain confidential and previous reports or claims should not be relied on as accurate,’ adds the friend.

How much Charles was obliged to pay and where the funds came from is not known. 

His friend says: ‘Clearly there are circumstances in which individuals may be obliged to uphold residual financial commitments undertaken by others.’

Did taxpayers foot the bill?

In the summer of 2022, the Treasury received a Freedom of Information request asking if the former duke’s ‘legal fees and/or his undisclosed settlement fee regarding the civil sexual assault case involving Virginia Giuffre involved any money from HMT’s Sovereign Grant to the Royal Family or if any other government-funded money was used in the case or settlement’.

Its reply seemed unequivocal: ‘No public money has been used to pay legal or settlement fees you refer to.’ 

Yet when it comes to Royal finances, there are many grey areas, and the truth tends to hinge on semantics: can the family’s money (which almost certainly did end up funding the settlement) be described as personal wealth? Or since almost all of it derives from duchies and grants, does it ultimately belong to the nation?

Uncertainty around this matter is, arguably, at the heart of the mess that currently surrounds Andrew.

What happened to the money?

The cash Virginia Giuffre received from Andrew didn’t buy happiness. She took her own life last April, shortly after separating from Robert, her martial arts instructor husband of 22 years.

Since there was no valid will, a legal battle over control of her estate is currently making its way through the Australian courts.

It pits Giuffre’s two sons, Christian and Noah, against her lawyer Karrie Louden and a former carer, Cheryl Myers, who claim to have been verbally appointed as executors and trustees shortly before her death. What remains unclear is the value of the assets under dispute.

Giuffre was believed to own at least four properties, two of which were valued at more than £1million, including the small ranch 50 miles north of Perth where she died. 

But initial reports from Australia’s Supreme Court in October suggested that her net worth, once debts were taken into account, amounted to less than half a million dollars (£250,000).

It was later clarified that those reports were wide of the mark: official paperwork had merely stated that her estate was worth more than A$472,000 (£350,000), a legal threshold in Western Australia which governs how assets are divided when there is no will.

Much of the money that had come her way was, meanwhile, diverted into an entity called the Witty River Family Trust.

It was established in 2020 and lists Virginia and her estranged husband as co-directors with equal shares.

The trust was also used to hold compensation received from Ghislaine Maxwell to settle a defamation claim, and from JP Morgan, Epstein’s bank, which has paid out £215million to the sex offender’s victims via a class action lawsuit.

What became of her charity?

When Andrew settled Giuffre’s lawsuit, he promised to make a ‘substantial donation’ to her victims’ rights charity.

On paper, that referred to an organisation called ‘Victims Refuse Silence’ which his accuser had launched in 2015. 

It was supposed to help combat human trafficking, but doesn’t seem to have received any of the Prince’s cash and had been defunct for years when America’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revoked its charitable status in 2023.

Miss Giuffre had by then launched a second non-profit named Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR) which claims on its website to be ‘dedicated to providing a safe and empowering space for survivors of sex trafficking to reclaim their stories and stand up for themselves and each other’. 

Yet by the time of her death, the status of SOAR was shrouded in mystery. No US company records appeared to exist, and the organisation was not registered with the IRS.

Though the website has been live for several years, visitors are told that ‘at this early stage, we are not yet accepting donations’.

What’s Andrew up to now?

In the 27 days since Andrew was spirited away from Royal Lodge in the dead of night, he has been seen only once – haunted and wide-eyed in the back of a car, in a picture that went around the world hours after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. 

He’s since been holed up in modest accommodation at his late father’s bolthole, Wood Farm, on the King’s Sandringham estate. He is due to move into his new full-time home at Marsh Farm in April.

This property is far more visible to the public – but privacy is the least of his problems.

Shorn of his royal titles, he has also lost many of the privileges of his royal birthright that he once took for granted. 

At Royal Lodge he was cosseted by staff – but the former prince will now have to make do with one valet-cum-house manager – an ex-Scots Guards soldier – and one cook, responsible for the weekly shop at a nearby Sainsbury’s. The future of his privately funded bodyguards is unknown.

One fixture in his inner circle is lawyer Gary Bloxsome, who was originally hired to help fight the sex abuse claims made by Virginia Giuffre in 2020. 

The golf-loving solicitor gained the nickname ‘Good News Gary’ for his insistence on only briefing Andrew with ‘the best case scenario’.

His only other companions are his horses and dogs – corgis Muick and Sandy, who belonged to the late Queen, and five Norfolk terriers.

As his life implodes, might Andrew now decide that who paid to settle the case, and how much, is the one question the public has a right to know? If nothing else it would remove the stench of ‘hush money’ clinging, perhaps unfairly, to royal reputations.

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Published: 18:42 EST, 27 February 2026 | Updated: 19:28 EST, 27 February 2026

Elections Alberta says four more recall petitions against members of Premier Danielle Smith’s caucus have failed.

It means half of the two dozen petitions launched against United Conservative Party legislature members late last year have come up short.

So far, none have been successful.

One of the unsuccessful campaigns, confirmed Friday by Elections Alberta, was against Agriculture Minister R.J. Sigurdson.

That campaign collected roughly nine per cent of the nearly 16,000 signatures it needed to force a constituency-wide vote, the agency said in a statement Friday.

Sigurdson, in a public letter posted online earlier this week, said the low turnout goes to show he has support in his southern Alberta riding.

“This result is not only clear but conclusive: the petition did not reflect the views of the vast majority of Highwood residents and demonstrated a lack of genuine public support,” Sigurdson said.

He also said he thought the recall process was misused and claimed it was organized as an attempt to publicly discredit him rather than to seek accountability from a politician neglecting responsibilities.

“Weaponizing recall in this way is a misuse of democratic tools, wastes taxpayer resources, and undermines trust in the institutions that serve all Albertans,” he said.

Elections Alberta said Friday the other failed campaigns were against Muhammad Yaseen, the associate minister of multiculturalism, Speaker Ric McIver and backbencher Jackie Lovely.

A preliminary count showed the petition against Yaseen collected just under seven per cent of signatures needed, while McIver’s petition had about 13 per cent.

The petition against Lovely was withdrawn last week, days before the three-month collection period was set to end.

The four petitions were among 10 due this week.

Four of the other petitioners told The Canadian Press on Monday their efforts were unsuccessful.

The results of the remaining two petitions due this week are not yet public. The petitioners targeting Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf and UCP backbencher Glenn Van Dijken didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Elections Alberta said the agency can’t yet provide an update on those two campaigns, as preliminary counts and contacting all involved takes time.

There are still 12 active petitions against UCP caucus members, including the premier. There are also two petitions targeting members of the Opposition NDP.

Many of those who started the petitions against the UCP have said they were motivated by the government’s use of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to force striking teachers back to work last fall. Others have said their representatives were hard to reach or dismissive of local concerns.

All outstanding petitions come due next month.

Petitioners have three months to collect signatures equal to 60 per cent of the total number of votes cast in their constituency in the 2023 provincial election.

If successful, a constituency-wide vote would be held on whether the politician keeps their seat. If the member loses, a byelection would be held.

&copy 2026 The Canadian Press

By DAN BARKER FOR THE SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL

Published: 16:29 EST, 27 February 2026 | Updated: 16:38 EST, 27 February 2026