Met Police ‘launch new investigation’ into Jill Dando’s unsolved murder after ‘CCTV breakthrough’ – with Serbian assassin under suspicion
Police have launched a new investigation into the unsolved murder of Jill Dando following a CCTV breakthrough.
The BBC Crimewatch presenter, 37, was shot in the head on the doorstep of her home in Fulham in April 1999. Her killer has never been found.
The Met Police has confirmed it will now re-examine original footage taken at Putney Bridge Tube station of an unidentified man, known as Man X, captured walking along the assassin’s likely escape route around 20 minutes after Ms Dando’s murder.
The man is believed to closely match the features of suspect Milorad Ulemek, a notorious Serbian assassin and paramilitary commander who is currently serving a 137-year prison sentence for Yugoslav war crimes.
A spokesman for the Met said investigations remain ‘ongoing’. They said: ‘Recent advancements in CCTV enhancement technology have provided investigators with the opportunity to re-examine original footage from Putney Bridge train station.’
Ulemek, 58, was first named in connection with Ms Dando’s murder in 2024 by The Mirror after he was found to have similar features to Man X by a facial comparison expert.
A new investigation into the unsolved murder of Jill Dando has been launched by the Met Police following a CCTV breakthrough
Notorious assassin Milorad Lukovic Ulemek is thought to be Man X, who was captured walking along the assassin’s likely escape route around 20 minutes after Ms Dando’s murder
The first image shows CCTV footage of Man X. The second shows Milorad Ulemek wearing a stripy blue tie like the one worn by Man X
CCTV footage taken from the Tube station, located around one mile from Ms Dando’s home on Gowan Avenue, captured Man X walking close to the murder scene around 20 minutes after she was shot on April 26, 1999.
It is understood cold-case officers spent ten months this year finding and digitising the original footage of Man X, using modern forensic imaging technology aimed at determining if Ulemek was in the station on the night of Ms Dando’s murder.
Authorities were originally told of Man X by a witness who had been driving on Fulham Palace Road at the time of Ms Dando’s murder.
She told detectives she saw a man dressed in a suit ‘running for his life’, and picked out Man X as the man she had seen sprinting on the CCTV footage one month later.
But her evidence was dismissed by police, who claimed the woman’s description did not match Man X – despite both men having similar colouring and being dressed in a suit and tie.
A second witness told authorities he was ’80 per cent’ certain it was Ulemek who ran in front of his vehicle on the same road.
Gowan Avenue, Fulham, where Jill Dando was shot dead in 1999
The journalist’s tragic and brutal death has long been the subject of intense speculation
Former French Foreign Legionnaire Ulemek is an infamous paramilitary commander whose units were implicated in the atrocities of the Yugoslav wars.
One month before Ms Dando died, Ulemek was asked to murder a ‘leading journalist’, a court heard previously. But he declined, he said, because he was needed in Kosovo. At the time of her death, Ulemek led a squad of assassins targeting those opposing Yugoslav and Serbian politician dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
But in the time following her death, the BBC received a call saying she was targeted in revenge for a recent Nato attack on a TV station in Belgrade, Serbia, in which 17 people died.
Weeks earlier Ms Dando had hosted a television appeal that raised £54million for Kosovan refugees who fled Serbian paramilitaries during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
The Crimewatch star once admitted that her role on the show left her in fear of retribution from the criminals she sought to expose.
It has long been suspected that she was shot by a professional assassin. Brit Barry George was tried and convicted of Ms Dando’s murder but was later cleared on appeal in 2007.
