A CRACK new squad of elite detectives could not have had a more dramatic start.

Within days of West Yorkshire Police's Homicide and Major Enquiry Team beginning work, two of its officers had been shot by a murder suspect who then turned the gun on himself.

It brought into sharp focus the fact that the team will be dealing with some of West Yorkshire's most dangerous criminals.

Now the man in charge of the team, Det Chief Supt Chris Gregg, has given an insight into how the new unit will work.

Each police division in West Yorkshire has its own CID office.

In the past, if a serious crime, such as a murder or stranger rape, happened, extra officers would have been needed instantly.

They were drafted in from CID offices across the county. So a detective from Huddersfield could be working on a Leeds case for many months.

Clearly, this left some CID units overstretched and senior officers would never quite know how many officers they had on any one day as they could be called to go anywhere at any time.

The new team has changed all that.

These officers will take on all the serious cases, leaving CID to concentrate on robberies and burglaries, that kind of crime.

Det Chief Supt Gregg, who was in charge of Huddersfield CID from 1996 to 1999, said: "We will take on all homicides - murders and manslaughters - and serious crimes, such as stranger rapes, kidnaps, extortion and terrorism.

"When the team was being set up we advertised nationally to make sure we got the best people."

Highly experienced detectives have moved from the Met in London and forces in South Wales, Greater Manchester and Northumbria to join the team.

Another former Huddersfield detective, Det Chief Insp Steve Hepplestone, is crime manager for three groups covering Kirklees, Calderdale and Bradford.

The workload from the start has been busy, as the team took on all continuing homicide and major crime investigations.

And it now gets involved immediately a murder happens.

Its first high-profile investigation was the murder of 20-year-old Thornton Lodge man Zubair Munir.

He was found shot in the head and dumped on moorland above Ripponden on Sunday, April 17 - a week after he went missing.

During the investigation, HMET detectives talked to 28-year-old Almondbury man Alexander Lawton.

He was staying at The Fleece pub in Ripponden, but when two detectives went to arrest him on Monday, April 18, he suddenly produced a gun and shot them both.

A 44-year-old woman was shot in the thigh and her male colleague, aged 39, was hit in the stomach.

Neither was badly hurt, but both are still off work recovering from their wounds.

Hours later, Lawton was found slumped in his car in Northowram after shooting himself in the head.

He died the next day.

Det Chief Supt Gregg has headed some of West Yorkshire Police's most high-profile investigations, including the murder of Pc Ian Broadhurst in Oakwood, Leeds, on Boxing Day, 2003.

Nightclub doorman David Bieber is serving life for the killing.

The team is split into six groups and based at four sites in Leeds and Bradford. But it can set up incident rooms at police stations across the county.

The squad includes eight detective superintendents, two detective chief inspectors, six detective inspectors, 24 detective sergeants and 96 detective constables, along with specialist civilian support staff.

Away from current crimes it will also look at historic murder cases - especially if new evidence comes to light.

Three are currently unsolved in Huddersfield - the brutal battering to death of 35-year-old Sarah Lewin at her home on Bradley Boulevard, Sheepridge, on January 14, 1994; the death of seven-year-old Joe McCafferty at a house on Haywood Avenue in Marsh on May 3, 1997; and the shooting of 50-year-old car electrical expert Brian Hardwick at Huddersfield Car Electrical Services on Colne Road on November 22, 2001.

Det Chief Supt Gregg said: "We are reviewing our systems on unsolved murders and will be looking at advances in science in all these cases.

"If any new information comes in, we will be following up the leads, but all such cases will be reviewed periodically by HMET officers."

The team is busy on Operation Recall, which is looking at unsolved stranger rapes stretching back to 1991 - including one in Huddersfield.

But Det Chief Supt Gregg said he could not say any more about this case now as the investigation was at a crucial stage.

At the core of all these stranger rape reviews are the advances in DNA science. Evidence from the original crime scenes is put through new tests to get a better DNA profile of the rapists.

This profile is then checked against the national DNA database which contains the DNA profile of 3m offenders across the UK.

Det Chief Supt Gregg said: "People who may have thought they had got away with a serious sex crime may be in for a nasty shock."

Up to 20 cases going back to 1991 are being reinvestigated in this way - and the techniques could be used to re-examine cases stretching back 30 years.