UK police arrest 12 people as investigation into wrong-way Middlesbrough crash widens

Twelve people have been arrested on offences including being involved with organised crime by detectives investigating the lead-up to the A66 crash in Middlesbrough, England which killed two police officers.Cleveland Police said nine men and three women, aged between 19 and 61 have been arrested on suspicion of offences ranging from possession of a firearm to participating in the activities of an organised crime group.The force said its officers had responded to reports two cars were being driven dangerously on Saturday, August 22nd.The Volkswagen Passat, which collided with the vehicle of police officers Matthew Blades and Tom Clough, had earlier been sought in connection with a Volvo XC60 that was seen ramming properties in the Middlesbrough area.Both vehicles had cloned number plates but were picked up by automated number plate recognition technology, the force said, and the Volvo XC60 has been traced and recovered in Middlesbrough.Four of the five people in the Passat, including three teenagers, had previous police convictions.The force statement said: “At the current time, there is no evidence to indicate that filming of the activities that took place on Friday night and Saturday morning has taken place for the purposes of TikTok.”The crash in the early hours of Saturday occurred when the Volkswagen Passat, containing five people aged between 23 and 17, crashed head-on with the marked armed response vehicle while driving the wrong way on the A66.The five people in the Passat: Cole Robert Worthy (17), Theo Rae (17), Makai Saddington (18), and Michael Robert Cahill (23) and Jacob Matusiak (23) were also pronounced dead at the scene.The Passat was being pursued by police, who began following it after receiving intelligence of “multiple incidents” related to a vehicle matching its description. Police chased the car for seven minutes before it started to drive against the flow of traffic on the A66, at which point officers aborted the pursuit and remained on the correct side of the carriageway.The car then collided with Blades’s and Clough’s vehicle about 10 seconds later.The A66 crash came just under a week after five teenagers died in a crash involving a car driving in the wrong direction on a motorway in Ireland. A vehicle driving the wrong way of the M9 in County Kildare collided with a car containing four people, all of whom were hospitalised with serious injuries.- PA