Jill Dando murder: Detectives review enhanced CCTV in new hope for cold case

Detectives are using new CCTV enhancement techniques to review evidence in the unsolved murder of television presenter Jill Dando.

They will re-examine enhanced CCTV of a man at Putney Bridge tube station who was also seen sprinting near the scene of the shooting.

The Crimewatch presenter, 37, was shot dead on her doorstep in Fulham, west London, on 26 April 1999.

A local man with learning difficulties, Barry George, was charged with her murder a year later and served eight years before his conviction was overturned and he was cleared in a retrial.

The notorious case has remained unsolved ever since and the investigation has been inactive in recent years.

However advancements in CCTV technology have enabled officers to look more closely at the old footage.

A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said: “In the 27 years since Jill Dando's murder, the investigation has been subject to numerous reviews, aiming to identify whether matters could be progressed with advances in technology and forensics.

“Recent advancements in CCTV enhancement technology have provided investigators with the opportunity to re-examine original footage from Putney Bridge train station.”

However, the force has warned the review forms part of “ongoing enquiries and should not be interpreted as a significant line of inquiry nor as a new investigation being opened on this matter.”

Cold-case officers are understood to have spent the last ten months locating and digitising the original CCTV of the person, known as ‘Man X’.

He was on the gunman's likely escape route around 20 minutes after Ms Dando was shot outside her home on Gowan Avenue.

The raw footage was believed to be buried somewhere in 223 boxes of material in police storage.

The Mirror reports that investigators will assess whether the man in the footage is a Serbian assassin, whom a facial comparison expert has said looks like Man X.

A witness who came forward on the day of the murder said she had been driving on Fulham Palace Road at around the time of the shooting when she saw a man in a suit "running for his life".

A month later, she picked out Man X in the CCTV as the person she had seen sprinting. But her evidence was dismissed because he did not match the description she had first given of the running man.

Ms Dando, who was one of Britain’s most recognisable BBC newsreaders, was attacked from behind as she was about to open her front door and killed instantly by a single bullet to her left temple.

Just 20 days before she was killed, she had fronted a BBC Kosovo Crisis Appeal that raised more than £1m in 24 hours for refugees fleeing the violence.

Within hours of her murder, the BBC received a call claiming it was linked to a NATO attack on a Belgrade TV station.

At the time, Western involvement which included Nato bombing of key Serb targets had begun, with British forces carrying out strikes in Belgrade just days before Ms Dando’s murder.