Reece Salmon, described by loved ones as a devoted father, was a prolific gangster who worked for an international criminal network, the Daily Mail can reveal.

The murder investigation is now entering its second week after the 28-year-old was found suffering from stab wounds outside a £1.55million property on Lloyd Baker Street, Clerkenwell, last Wednesday. He died in hospital the following day.

The killer remains at large, fuelling shock, anger and silence in the affluent Islington neighbourhood, which residents have described as peaceful, quiet and safe.

At about 11.20pm on September 16, residents were jolted by the sudden arrival of police cars and ambulances, their blue lights flashing through the shutters of nearby townhouses.

When the Daily Mail visited this week, a memorial stood opposite the scene, covered with flowers, candles and emotional messages. Bottles and cans of AU Vodka, Courvoisier, Jack Daniel’s, Red Bull, Buzzballs and magnums had also been left at the vigil.

A longtime friend who attended nursery with Mr Salmon said at the memorial: ‘He was the f***ing loveliest guy you’d ever meet. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body, a proper respectful geezer.’

His devastated family released a photograph of him drinking a Pornstar Martini while on holiday and described him as a ‘loving partner and son’ who ‘leaves behind many friends and loved ones’.

However, the Daily Mail can reveal that Salmon had previously been jailed in Britain for a series of gang robberies across London before becoming involved in an international fraud operation in New Zealand linked to a UK-based criminal organisation.

Salmon, who lived on City Road in Islington, belonged to a moped gang that terrorised London streets while armed with axes, samurai swords and zombie knives.

He and three other men were described as ‘big operators in north London’ after carrying out a series of phone snatchings and robberies across the capital.

In 2019, Salmon pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery in Camden, Islington, Westminster and the City of London. He was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison.

After serving his sentence, he moved to New Zealand, where he became involved in what was described as a serious fraud campaign while working for a UK-based criminal organisation.

He was jailed in New Zealand in June last year for his role in an elaborate NZ$400,000 (£171,000) fraud targeting pensioners aged between 69 and 95. One victim was reportedly conned at a retirement village.

The fraud was conducted by phone internationally by members of the UK gang, with Salmon acting as a ‘courier’ in New Zealand. He collected cash and gold from victims’ homes.

Gang members posed as police officers and persuaded victims to co-operate with what they believed was an undercover investigation.

‘The victims’ assistance involved them withdrawing large amounts of cash from their banks or, in some cases, purchasing gold bullion,’ the judge told Wellington District Court.

According to local media reports, victims took the cash and gold to their homes, where a courier arrived, gave them a codeword and collected the valuables.

Salmon, one of the couriers, took money and gold from 19 victims between July 2024 and early August, often wearing disguises.

He was arrested when one of his victims was asked to buy $170,000 in gold bullion and police intercepted as Salmon arrived to pick it up.

In total, he stole $239,500 in cash and $172,000 in gold.

A widow, who lived alone, said in her victim impact statement that she had $171,000 in gold and $20,000 in cash stolen over four visits.

Salmon pleaded guilty to 15 counts of obtaining cash and gold by deception – and another two charges of attempting to obtain by deception. 

He was sentenced to four years in prison, reduced for his guilty pleas and the impact a custodial sentence would have on his partner and daughter, then aged three.

However, he was granted parole in February this year and deported back to Britain.

‘You’re still relatively young. You have the ability to change,’ the judge told him.

‘Clearly since you were a young person you’ve been mixing with a criminal crowd. Your background of offending has made that likely that you will be engaged with others who will lead you into a path of offending.

‘You have the ability to decide on your return to the UK whether you will continue with that type of connection or separate yourself and concentrate on your partner and child. That’s a decision that you have to make.’

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Salmon had only been back in Islington for seven months before he was stabbed to death.

For much of the last seven days, residents say they have had to sign in and out with police every time they leave their homes as homicide detectives piece together just what happened.

Detectives have been forensically combing the area and interviewing neighbours on Lloyd Baker Street, where homes are worth up to £2.25million, for the last week, but the knifeman is still on the run. 

Pictures of him wearing a matching Arsenal kit with his daughter have been left at the memorial, along with his ‘RS’ initials spelled out in candles and flowers.  

A friend at the memorial said: ‘I know as much as the police. They obviously don’t have a clue, they’ve been driving everyone mad.

‘I’ve known him for years, I used to go to nursery with him. It’s one of those faces you just see around. Everyone in the area knows him.’

When I asked about his friend’s time in New Zealand, he declined to discuss and walked into the house where Salmon was stabbed in front of. The owner of the house slammed the door shut when we approached.

Others shouted ‘no one is going to tell you anything’. 

A neighbour living a few doors down from the fatal stabbing said: ‘It’s absolutely awful. I was in the living room and just saw the flashing lights through the shutters and then all the ambulances showed up and they taped everything up.

‘It’s like something you see on the TV. It’s horrible. It’s a very local area, nothing like this has ever happened.’

Another, a father of one, said: ‘It’s a very quiet residential street. There’s a lot of family houses. The police were there for four or five days, they blocked the road entirely. We were signing in and out every day.

‘They are doing it very thoroughly.

‘Everyone is quite shocked. Hopefully they get him [the killer].’

‘It’s unusual, it’s normally a quiet respectable street. I don’t think he was from this area [of Islington], I think he came from somewhere else and ended up here.’

A woman who lived near where the memorial has been set up said police came and searched her garden, adding: ‘Nobody knows what’s going on.  

‘This area is a very quiet area to live, this has never happened. I’ve lived here a long long time, more than 30 years.’

A Post Office worker said: ‘When we came for deliveries, the police closed the road for almost the whole week. It’s very sad.

‘King’s Cross Road is so busy, but as soon as you come up here, it’s so nice and peaceful. It’s beautiful.’

A neighbour who has lived in the area for 40 years said: ‘Everybody is nice to each other and very friendly. This never happens, it’s just a one-off.’

The victim’s family said: ‘We are utterly devastated by this loss.

‘Reece was a loving partner and son, and he leaves behind many friends and loved ones.

‘It is impossible to put our loss into words.’

Chief Superintendent Jason Stewart, who leads policing in the local area, said: ‘This is a tragic incident, and our thoughts remain with the family and friends of the young man who has lost his life.

‘You can expect to see additional officers in the area providing visible reassurance and working with partners to keep the public safe.

‘The victim was found in a residential street, and members of the public may have information of vital importance to our investigation. If you can help, please come forward.’

Wars can begin with a single, disastrous miscalculation. In 1914, the Kaiser believed Britain would stay neutral if Germany invaded Belgium. He was wrong.

Prime Minister Herbert Asquith promised Brussels the Empire’s “whole-hearted and unfailing support” and led Britain into the Great War, a conflict that claimed the lives of three-quarters of a million Britons.

More than a century later, Vladimir Putin may be approaching a similarly catastrophic miscalculation—one that could invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and push Europe towards a third world war.

Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Europe has watched with growing alarm as Putin pursued increasingly expansive ambitions. Concern turned to panic after the Kremlin’s vision of renewed imperial power culminated in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But there is little reason to assume Russian forces would stop at Kyiv. A leaked 2023 Kremlin memo reportedly set out plans for the annexation of ally Belarus by 2030.

Vladimir Putin may be 73, but he continues to portray himself as a vigorous wartime leader in the tradition of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible.

After observing the dictator for three decades, I have little doubt that he wants to emulate those predecessors by pushing Russia’s borders deeper into Eastern Europe, particularly areas with strong Russian cultural ties.

Putin is, in effect, an ageing leader in a hurry. I fear he is nearing a reckless escalation that could plunge Europe—as Churchill once warned—into a new Dark Age.

Three developments lead me to believe the Russian leader may be preparing further military action—moves that could inadvertently trigger Article 5, the Nato provision declaring an attack on one member to be an attack on all.

The first is credible evidence that Moscow is preparing a major new mobilisation of troops.

Last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia was planning a “rapid mobilisation” of roughly 300,000 men by the end of the year. During the final week of August, at least 113,000 Russian citizens reportedly left the country through Georgia’s Upper Lars checkpoint, apparently seeking to avoid the expected draft.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin has instructed Army generals to improve their records on reservists, including their locations and readiness for combat. A draft law would also allow fines of up to one million rubles—about £9,000—for Russian companies accused of failing to support the war effort or obstructing mobilisation.

The second, and more troubling, development came last weekend, when Russia’s Federal Security Service restricted movement in two areas bordering Estonia, including by imposing a night-time curfew. Reports also indicate that Russian forces are reinforcing the bank of the Narva River, which marks the border—possible signs of preparations for a land assault on the Nato member.

Estonia is a small nation of just over one million people with only around 7,000 active military personnel. Much of its population speaks Russian, while some border communities retain a strong sense of Soviet nostalgia.

Estonia has been a Nato member since 2004. Yet would its allies truly go to war with Russia on its behalf? Would people in Nuremberg, Nantes or Nottingham risk their lives for the residents of Vasknarva or Lutepää?

The third development came last week, when Belarus, a close Russian ally, began a major four-day military exercise close to its borders with Poland and Lithuania. The drills included tank battalions and took place near the strategically vital 25-mile Suwalki Gap, the shortest land route between Belarus and Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, across Lithuanian and Polish territory.

A Russian seizure of the Suwalki Gap would have grave consequences for the Baltic states. Cut off from the rest of Europe, they could become vulnerable targets for Russia’s military machine.

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Adding to the concern, Moscow allegedly flew a drone across the Gap into Kaliningrad earlier this month, apparently testing or surveying Nato air defences.

The direction of travel seems all too clear.

The question for Andy Burnham and other Nato leaders, then, is whether or not any of these actual or potential incursions meet the threshold for triggering Article 5. And, more to the point, whether Western Europe has the means to triumph in a clash with Moscow and its allies.

To his immense discredit, Donald Trump has long cosied up to the repulsive Putin. With the US President’s foolish war in the Middle East proving hard to stop, he is unlikely to embroil American troops in further escalations in Europe, especially for a perceived ‘minor’ incursion by Russia into the Baltics.

Knowing this, other European countries have signified their readiness to act. Last Friday, French President Macron held a successful cross-party summit to build consensus on a plan in the event of war between Europe and Russia.

Yet while France is also mobilising aggressively, Britain sits on its derriere.

Just three months ago, then-Defence Secretary John Healey resigned over failures to boost military spending to three per cent of GDP. Now promoted to Chancellor, Healey looks set to fall short of that mark again.

For Britain, the real challenge will not be boldly answering the call to Article 5 and coming to the aid of the Baltic states but rather if we have the capabilities to do anything to help them in the first place.

The Labour Government has talked tough on defence but failed miserably to put its words into action.

By the end of the Cold War the British Army had 153,000 regular soldiers. Today, we have fewer than half that.

Of course, a Russian attack on Nato could come in another more deniable form: cyber warfare, state-sponsored terrorism, a ‘false flag’ attack, lawfare or even spreading hostile disinformation intended to weaken European alliances.

In the short term, such hybrid escalations seem the most likely.

After all – and thank God –Putin knows he cannot currently sustain all-out war with Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to at least 1.4 million casualties on its own side, including almost half a million dead.

And while Putin, like Stalin before him, no doubt sees such a toll as a ‘statistic not a tragedy’, he surely calculates it will be easier to weaken Nato’s resolve first, then take what he wants.

There is already evidence he is succeeding in this.

A decisive victory for the hard-Right and grotesquely Russophile AfD party in east German local elections last week marked a major coup for Putin – and proved that western Europeans are not entirely united against the Kremlin.

Vladimir Putin is a risk taker. After four years’ stalemate in Ukraine, the ageing President is planning his next move. Only time will tell whether he could spark a conflagration that would soon engulf the continent.

• Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute in Oxford.

A California lawmaker who has sharply criticized the Trump administration’s deportation campaign is now dealing with the detention of one of her own staff members—a Hong Kong native taken into custody by ICE in Las Vegas.

Ho-Yin Mo, a field representative for Assemblywoman Catherine Stefani, was arrested Thursday during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation at Harry Reid International Airport. Stefani represents California’s 19th Assembly District, which includes parts of San Francisco and San Mateo County.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to the Daily Mail on Tuesday that “ICE arrested Ho-Yin Mo, an illegal alien from Hong Kong, during a targeted enforcement operation.”

According to Homeland Security, Mo legally entered the United States on a temporary basis in January 2020 but “illegally overstayed his welcome by failing to depart by May 15, 2020.”

The agency also stated that “work authorization or a pending application do NOT confer legal status in the United States.”

Mo previously worked as a news anchor and reporter for KTSF Channel 26, a Chinese-language television station based in San Francisco.

In 2024, he also served as an Asian American and Pacific Islander outreach organizer for London Breed’s unsuccessful mayoral re-election campaign.

“When we heard that Mo was available, we jumped at the opportunity to hire him, because we know that his profile on KTSF really resonates with a lot of individuals, and his background and his experience,” Breed spokesperson Joe Arellano said when Mo was hired.

Mo has worked for Stefani since January 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Stefani has meanwhile emerged as a vocal opponent of the ICE crackdown on illegal immigration.

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle last October, the Democrat condemned an ICE operation in the Bay Area, describing it as an abuse of power and a direct threat to the community.

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“It is about fear and control,” Stefani said.

“We must remain peaceful, united and vigilant. This administration wants chaos. We will answer with strength, solidarity and resolve.”

A source told the Daily Mail that Mo was being held at the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump, west of Las Vegas, following his arrest.

The source said Mo was expected to remain in custody while removal proceedings move forward.

“DHS reversed the horrendous Biden-era policy that allowed aliens in our country illegally to jet around our country,” the department said in connection with Mo’s arrest.

“Under President Trump, DHS will no longer tolerate this. This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.”

In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Stefani said, “My message today is simple: I am respectfully calling for Ho Yin Mo’s release as soon as possible. Ho Yin is a selfless public servant and a valued, legal employee of the California State Legislature serving our San Francisco and Bay Area communities.

‘When Ho Yin and I meet our Chinese-American constituents, he brings a unique sense of belonging to so many who watched him as a TV reporter. And his work goes far beyond presence. 

‘Ho Yin helps people access affordable health care coverage, child care, and food support,’ she added. ‘Our whole community eagerly awaits Ho Yin’s return to his home and his job where he is loved and adored.’

Frankie Falzon, a district director for Stefani, previously told the Daily Mail that they had been ‘advised by legal counsel that it would not be in his interest to talk at this time.’ 

‘We are just a few days into this,’ Falzon said. 

‘We’re trying to work through as many channels as possible now. That could change at some point.’

Anthony Albanese is backing a worldwide effort to impose stronger oversight on artificial intelligence, placing him at odds with US President Donald Trump, who has criticised attempts to regulate the rapidly advancing technology.

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday local time, Trump said he “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control artificial intelligence”.

His remarks came a day after Albanese joined more than 20 countries in calling for greater international supervision of AI. The nations warned that governments risk falling behind the technology’s rapid development.

The joint declaration, signed by countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and South Africa, said artificial intelligence must remain under human control and comply with international law.

“AI must remain under human direction, oversight and control. It must be developed and used in line with international law,” the statement said.

Trump, by contrast, said governments should promote AI’s development rather than place restrictions on it.

“Whoever wins super intelligence, wins,” Trump said. “We’re leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else. And we’re going to keep it that way.

“I’m not going to stifle growth of something that many say is bigger than the industrial revolution or the internet itself. We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in.”

The international statement also urged technology companies to establish safety protocols and called on governments to co-ordinate common standards.

Albanese’s push for tighter technology safeguards has also drawn criticism from the US administration after Labor unveiled its digital duty of care regime earlier this month.

The proposed laws would allow social media users to opt out of algorithm-driven feeds. They have faced strong opposition from the US Embassy in Canberra, which issued an unusual statement warning the measures could amount to online censorship.

“The US government would likely consider such a measure as facilitating censorship,” the statement said.

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“We ask that Australia withdraw any plans to mandate that platforms algorithmically suppress content based on ambiguous, government-defined safety criteria.”

The embassy also said the legislation could create significant concerns over fair competition, market access and trade treatment for US companies, independent media outlets and content creators.

The statement was released just hours before Albanese was scheduled to speak at a UN General Assembly event focused on protecting children online.

Albanese is due to address the Coalition for Children’s Rights and Protection in the Age of AI alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

The prime minister is expected to say Australia’s digital duty of care laws build on the world-first reforms that prohibit children under 16 from holding social media accounts.

‘Australia is now introducing additional laws… to put choice back into the hands of Australia over the algorithm,’ Albanese will say.

‘They will make social media platforms give people the choice.’

Albanese also discussed the social media measures with former Apple chief executive Tim Cook at the tech giant’s California headquarters on Sunday.

The pair had a one-hour closed-door meeting after Mr Cook extended an invitation to the PM following a phone conversation about child safety measures on Apple devices.

Some of those measures were inspired by the social media ban.

Albanese will tell the UN coalition the social media ban is showing results.

‘Our ban gives our children precious breathing space in which to mature and make safer social media decisions,’ he will say.

‘We must give children back their childhood. The ban is making a difference.’