内容摘要：“It will be his mum’s and brother's birthdays this month, as well as what would have been Owen’s 21st birthday in December – these things just never get easier.

“It will be his mum’s and brother's birthdays this month, as well as what would have been Owen’s 21st birthday in December – these things just never get easier.

The mission, co-ordinated by global policing agency Interpol, led to the arrest of 300 people with links to Black Axe and other affiliated groups.Interpol called the operation a “major blow” to the Nigerian crime network, but warned that its international reach and technological sophistication mean it remains a global threat.

In one notorious example, Canadian authorities said they had busted a money-laundering scheme linked to Black Axe worth more than $5bn (£3.8bn) in 2017.“They are very organised and very structured,” Tomonobu Kaya, a senior official at Interpol’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, told the BBC.According to a 2022 report by Interpol, “Black Axe and similar groups are responsible for the majority of the world’s cyber-enabled financial fraud as well as many other serious crimes”.

Mr Kaya said innovations in money-transfer software and cryptocurrency have played into the hands of group, which are renowned for multi-million dollar online scams.“These criminal syndicates are early adopters of new technologies… A lot of fintech developments make it really easy to illegally move money around the world,” he said.

Operation Jackal III was years in the making and led to the seizure of $3m of illegal assets and more than 700 bank accounts being frozen.

Many Black Axe members are university educated and are recruited during their schooling.The files have been published in a new book, The Murderer Who Must Be Saved, by French investigative journalists Karl Laske and Vincent Nouzille, and Libyan activist Samir Shegwara.

Mr Shegwara - who took part in the uprising against Gaddafi in 2011 - told the reporters the documents were retrieved from the archives of Libya's former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi, who was named as a Lockerbie suspect in 2015.The journalists spent four years checking their contents with contacts and against information already in the public domain.

Mr Nouzelle said: "Samir Shegwara's not interested in money or in revenge."He just wants these documents to go public for truth and for history and for justice.