Last updated 12:16, Saturday, 25 October 2008

A MAN accused of raiding a Lake District garage has been found not guilty.

Maurice Smith, 46, was accused of being one of two men caught trying to cut their way into the machine on the forecourt of the Newby Bridge Motors garage with an oxyacetylene torch.

He was found not guilty at the end of a three-day trial at Carlisle Crown Court yesterday.

The court heard that when police arrived the two raiders drove off in a stolen Land Rover, but not before trying to ram the police van.

As they drove off towards Ambleside they threw rocks at the police van chasing them. They then did a three-point turn so they could ram it again.

The two officers in the van, PCs John Baldwin and Shane Wheeler, needed hospital treatment for whiplash injuries.

The court heard one man, 46-year-old Paul Barcock, of Brooklands Avenue, Maryport, had already pleaded guilty to his involvement in the raid, which took place on November 8 last year, and had been sentenced.

But Mr Smith, of Town Croft, Dearham, Maryport, denied being the second man, and pleaded not guilty to aggravated vehicle taking, affray, attempted theft and possessing oxyacetylene cutting equipment in connection with theft.

Prosecuting counsel Mr Robert Elias told the jury at the start of the trial the raid was “a brazen attempt” to take money from the hole-in-the-wall cash machine.

“It had none of the romance or glamour of the safe crackers you might have read about in detective stories,” he said. “This was much nastier and ruthless.”

Barcock was arrested after being caught by a police dog after the criminals abandoned their getaway car in Grizedale Forest.

Mr Elias claimed Mr Smith was the other man involved because his DNA was found on a sweatband inside the welder’s mask worn while the men were trying to cut the machine open with an oxyacetylene torch.

But, though Mr Smith admitted the mask was his, he insisted he had not been involved in the raid. He said he had not known until afterwards that his mask had been taken by someone else – presumably Barcock, he said.

He admitted he knew Barcock, and that he had been in a car with him in Keswick a few days before the raid, but said he wasn’t with him on the night of the raid.