Mark Shields went out to Jamaica appointed to counter the island’s endemic gun crime, Yardie gangs and drug culture. He certainly never expected an emerging cricket scandal.

This week the former British policeman found himself fielding questions on an investigation far removed from his previous career as a hostage negotiator, drugs intelligence officer, counter-terrorist manager and down-to-earth station commander in a seaside town.

But his former collegues believe he will handle it well. One said: “He is a thorough investigator. Competent and highly thought of.”

Now in his late 40s Mr Shields orginally went to Jamaica as part of a Scotland Yard investigation into a shoot to kill policy among Jamaican police. In 2005 the Jamaican government decided to recruit internationally to bring fresh minds to bear on the force’s problems.

Mr Shields was sent to Kingston on long-term secondment as the number two with responsibility for crime fighting after talks between Scotland Yard, the Foreign Office and Jamaica's ministry of national security.

It has not been easy. Police have been gunned down; there have been arguments about policing and Mr Shields has found himself squarely in the limelight.

Its a new experience for a UK police high-flier who started his career walking the beat in the City of London force before transfering to CID. At 28 he was head of Special Branch in the force at a time when the City was a priority target for the IRA.

He won a police scholarship to Essex University, took a degree in politics and government and returned to find his patch devastated by the Bishopsgate bomb in 1993. Faced with threats from the business community to leave London the City force launched its Ring of Steel, a network of highly sophisticated CCTV cameras circling the Square Mile supported by checkpoints.

Mr Shields was project manager on the work but after a year was transfered to the National Criminal Intelligence Service working from Germany as a drugs liason officer covering Eastern Europe and keeping a watching brief on the banking centres in Switzerland used by money launderers.

He later said: “I was never involved in front-line undercover operations but corrdinated many. I ran sources of intelligence that gave us good intelligence about Russian organised crime, all sorts of things, running heroin through darkest Europe.”

Mr Shields came back to Britain to the more mundane world of policing in Essex and a divisional commander at Clacton. he now admits the world of candy floss, kiss me quick hats and youth crime was a different league from his previous experience but he wanted more experience of being in command.

By the late 1990s he had moved again, this time to Scotland Yard where he was a detective superintendent and then a chief superintendent in the serious crime directorate which covers the sharp end of London professional villainy from kidnaps to armed robberies.

In 2002 he led an operation against an alleged attempt to kidnap Victoria Beckham. A year later he was in charge of the arrest of Gary Nelson, a feared black gunman later jailed for the murder of Pc Patrick Dunne.

After arriving in Jamaica Mr Shields told a local newspaper last year: "I think I'm sometimes put up as the great colonial white expert who's come here with this panacea of knowledge about policing. I've always tried to say, and I passionately believe, that is not the case.”

He said: “What I can do is bring something else to the table to compliment the work that's already being done here." But that was regular crime Jamaica-style. He now may have something quite different to deal with.