.177 gas rifle

The .177 气步枪 was Darren Clements’s principal weapon in the ricin-pellet attacks: a gun-club purchase made under Jordan Springer’s name and ultimately found hidden beneath a workbench in a rented garage. Its recovery clarified the distinction between the weapon used in the earlier attacks and the target air pistol Darren had at the Trafford Centre, while forensic findings helped investigators narrow the kind of device they were seeking.

Identification and Forensic Distinction

During the investigation, firearms forensics considered whether pellets could have been fired from a long rifle using powder-activated nail-gun blanks. The recovered pellets, however, bore no rifling marks and no gunpowder residue; the sound of such a weapon, even with a suppressor, would also have been more conspicuous. Investigators therefore considered a standard air rifle or a target air pistol more likely. The distinction mattered because an earlier rifle at James Campbell’s cottage had already been ruled out: it was not the weapon that had fired the pellets.

Acquisition and Use

The recovered rifle had a specific path into the case. Darren joined a gun club shortly after his father left, using Jordan Springer’s name, and bought the air rifle through the club. Investigators later established that this was the rifle he had used for the earlier attacks. That discovery separated the weapon’s history from the air pistol Darren carried during the Trafford Centre confrontation: the pistol was present at the standoff, but the rifle had been used in the preceding attacks.

Recovery and Significance

Police found the rifle in a homemade rack beneath the workbench in the garage Darren was renting. The concealment turned a suspected weapon into a material link to the attack series, and its recovery supplied investigators with a concrete object to examine alongside the ricin-related evidence. The rifle’s identification also sharpened the contrast between the attack weapon and the pistol at the confrontation: the same perpetrator had used different air weapons in different circumstances, and finding the rifle helped explain how the earlier pellet attacks had been carried out.