A motorcyclist shot dead on one of Britain's busiest motorways as he returned home from an annual gathering of bikers with friends was a Canadian national, police said Tuesday.
Gerard Michael Tobin, 35, was shot in the back of the head by an assailant with a handgun from a green Rover 600-series car on the M40 near Stratford-upon-Avon in west central England. Detective Superintendent Ken Lawrence, from Warwickshire Police, said the motorcycle mechanic from south London had lived in Britain for the last 10 years and described him as a "hard-working man of good character".
The officer said he was keen to trace witnesses to the attack and the car involved, which is believed to have waited in a lay-by for Tobin and his friends to pass and followed them onto the motorway.
"It seems likely that this was a pre-planned event and it was not a random attack on Gerard," Lawrence told a news conference. "The reason why it should be planned and took place I don't know. That is clearly a key line of investigation that we are pursuing.
"It certainly appears to have been reasonably well-planned in that if that car in the lay-by was in fact there waiting for him to pass... expecting him to take that route, then of course, that does indicate some prior knowledge."
Tobin, who was riding a distinctive Harley-Davidson FXSTB model, had been attending the Bulldog Bash, Europe's biggest gathering of bikers at the Long Marston airfield about 20 miles (32 kilometres) from where he was shot.
The shooting, which is being treated as murder, saw the motorway shut down from Sunday afternoon to late Monday as police scoured the area for clues and studied closed-circuit television footage to try to track down the killer.
Lawrence said up to three people were in the car at the time and the assassin would have had to have been a crack shot as the bikes were travelling at about 70 miles (112 kilometres) per hour.
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