a pistol at the driver and told him to stop. Simultaneously, a party of about 30–40 men leaped over a wall at the side of the road, surrounded the van and seized the horses, one of which they shot. The unarmed police were described by O'Meagher Condon, who organised the attack on the police van, as "a miscellaneous lot, apparently embracing the long and short and the fat and lean of the Manchester force"; they offered little resistance and soon fled. The rescuers, after an unsuccessful attempt to force open the van with hatchets, sledgehammers, and crowbars, called upon Police Sergeant Brett, who was inside the van with the prisoners, to open the door. Brett refused, so one of the rescuers placed his revolver at the keyhole of the van to blow the lock, just as Brett looked through the keyhole to see what was happening outside. The bullet passed through his eye into his brain and killed him. The door was opened when one of the women prisoners took the keys from Brett's pocket, and passed them through a ventilator to the Fenians outside, allowing Kelly and Deasy to escape. Brett was the first Manchester police officer to be killed on duty, in an incident that became known locally as the "Manchester Outrages". Investigation The police suspected that Kelly and Deasy had been taken by their rescuers to Ancoats, considered at that time to be a Fenian area of Manchester. Anonymous letters alleged that the pair were being sheltered in a house on Every Street, but the 50 armed police who raided the premises found no signs of the fugitives. Despite a reward of £300 offered by the authorities, equivalent to about seven times a worker's average annual earnings, neither Kelly nor Deasy were recaptured. An article published in the 14 November edition of The Times newspaper reported that they had made their way to Liverpool, from where they had taken passage on a ship bound for New York. The police raided Manchester's Irish quarters and brought "dozens of suspects, selected almost at random", before local magistrates; the raids have been described as a "reign of terror" for the Irish in Manchester. Amongst those arrested was Thomas Maguire, a young Royal Marine on leave who had been in the vicinity of the attack on the police van and was Irish. Such was the zeal of the police that one