Moors murderer Ian Brady has suggested that a gun found on Saddleworth Moor last year was part of a secret stash of weapons he kept.

The weapon, a Eibar double-barrelled shotgun, was discovered still in its original case and wrapped in a polythene sheet, on the moors above Holmfirth in December.

It was found beneath rocks under an oak tree by a search party looking for the remains of Keith Bennett, Brady’s fifth victim, whose body has never been found.

Brady, 78, who is still in Ashworth high security hospital, wrote in a letter to a Channel 5 News reporter that he kept an arsenal of weapons, suggesting the shotgun may have been one of them in his possession in the early 1960s.

Ian Brady, child killer on Saddleworth Moor, where he attempted to pinpointed the peat bog graves of newly confessed victims Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade, 4th July 1987. Also pictured, Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping of Greater Manchester Police GMP, who was in charge of reopened investigation.

In the ketter to Julian Druker, he wrote: “Shotgun? I had two shotguns, two revolvers, two rifles, and an automatic, strategically placed.

“The police only got the revolvers and one rifle.”

Child killer Brady abused and murdered five children from the Greater Manchester area along with accomplice Myra Hindley on the moors in the 1960s.

The remains of 12-year-old Keith Bennett have never been found, despite tireless searches from his family and requests that the killer reveal the child’s place of rest.