Police in high-visibility uniforms swarmed around the rundown network of highrise flats and Victorian terraces yesterday in an operation designed not only to trace the killers but also to offer reassurance to those who call this area home.

Down the years casual violence has become a way of life on Langworthy as criminal gangs seek to wrest control from each other, but nothing had prepared its residents for the terrifying violence that broke out over several mad minutes on Sunday afternoon.

After the gun smoke cleared it appeared that the predominantly black gangs from south Manchester had once again tried to move in on the “white boys” from Salford.

Two would-be hitmen from a Moss Side-based gang, said to be of Asian or mixed-race appearance, went looking for revenge on a hoodlum they blamed for a city centre stabbing of one of their own. After opening fire on two men inside the Brass Handles public house on the corner of Edgehill Close and Fitzwarren Street they were chased by other customers and shot dead before they could reach their getaway car.

This part of Salford was once the fiefdom of Paul Massey, 46, also known as Salford’s “Mr Big”, whose security company once held a stranglehold on the doors of Manchester’s biggest and best-known clubs. He was jailed for 14 years in April 1999, for stabbing a man outside a nightclub.

There was speculation last night that Massey, a category A prisoner in Frankland Prison, Co Durham, remains a significant figure in Salford’s criminal underworld, even in his absence.

One police source acknowledged that the explosion of violence took the police force by surprise but added: “One name keeps cropping up: Paul Massey. He may be in jail but he has still got some cronies on the outside.”

Officers are linking the tit-for-tat shooting to a feud sparked by a recent incident in Manchester city centre when one gang member believed himself to have “lost face” in an apparently inconsequential confrontation.

Other reports suggest that there has been bad blood since the stabbing of a member of a crime family based in Moss Side, once the epicentre of the “Gunchester” phenomenon. The victim survived, but fellow gang members vowed that they would extract revenge.

At 2.15pm on Sunday women and children were mixing with regulars in the Brass Handles, an ugly, low-rise bar near Salford Shopping Centre.

The two men, wearing beanie hats, walked into the pub and then pulled the woollen rims over their faces to reveal home-made balaclavas. Some drinkers dived for cover beneath pool tables as the pair produced automatic weapons and fired at least four shots.

Two white men, both aged 27, were injured. According to one eye witness account, retaliation was almost instant with gunfire exchanged across the floor of the pub. The two hitmen ran from the pub across Fitzwarren Road and on to parkland known locally as The Croft with the mob at their heels. Children enjoying a Sunday afternoon kickabout scattered as shots rang out.

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