OPERATION Minstead is the police investigation that led to the arrest and conviction of the Night Stalker, Delroy Grant.
Cops arrested Grant on 2009 following one of the largest and most complex rape investigations ever undertaken by the Metropolitan Police.
What was Operation Minstead?
Operation Minstead is the codename of the decade-long investigation into the Night Stalker headed by DCI Simon Morgan.
Grant was also dubbed the Minstead Rapist and terrorised Londoners in a reign of terror between 1992 and 2009.
Operation Minstead identified around 21,000 possible suspects between 1999 and 2009.
In May 1999, police made a breakthrough that could have brought Grant's reign of terror to an end.
A member of the public saw Grant acting suspiciously near the scene of a burglary in Bromley and took his licence plate number down, handing it police, who tracked it down to the Grant.
The Met then referred this on to Scotland Yard's Operation Minstead team when a rookie detective accessed the wrong file on Delroy Grant who, unlike the rapist, was already on the national DNA database.
When cops checked the DNA against the Grant on their database, it came back with a negative result, ultimately ruling the suspect out and allowing him to continue his reign of attacks.
A spokesman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission said: "It was a simple misunderstanding which had horrific consequences."
Police got so desperate, they took expensive and fruitless trips to the Caribbean islands after the rapist's Ancestral DNA concluded the attack was likely from Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia or St Vincent – when he was originally from Jamaica, according to the Mirror.
But in August 2009 and after burglarising an 88-year-old Polish man, Grant was caught by police when he used his victim's cash card at a local ATM.
In October, police decided to change tactics and enlisted 70 undercover officers to catch Grant in the act.
In the early hours of November 15, 2009, their gamble paid off and Grant was arrested in the act of committing another burglary.
When cops searched his Vauxhall Zafra, they found the Night Stalker's rape kit – a grey balaclava, a blue cagole, a grey fleece and a crow bar.
In 2009, Grant was charged and convicted of rape, indecent assault, and burglary of elderly women across south east London and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Who was in charge of Operation Minstead?
DCI Simon Morgan headed the investigation but was later supported by DCI Colin Sutton.
Sutton was an SIO in the Met Police from January 2003 to January 2011, leading more than 30 successful murder investigations – notably the Levi Bellfield case.
He was the lead detective on the Amélie Delagrange murder case.
Sutton establish a surveillance plan to catch the Night Stalker in the act of a burglary. On the first night of the operation, Grant struck three times, each time just outside the area being monitored.
Cops managed to catch the rapist running to his car on CCTV. They noted his licence plate and caught him weeks later as he ran to his car after attempting to break into another elderly woman's home.
Why was the codename chosen?
The operation, which was launched in 1998 by the Met Police, ran for a decade and took its name from an alphabetical list of English villages.
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