"The head could be anywhere": The mystery of the headless torso under Piccadilly station that led to a playboy millionaire

"Murder cops hunt chainsaw maniacs," read the Manchester Evening News headline. It was the first report of a macabre murder that more 30 years later still has detectives baffled.

On December 17, 1993, Manchester was packed in the run up to Christmas. It was 'Mad Friday' and as shoppers and revellers poured into the city centre Piccadilly Station was bustling.

But just yards away, near a railway arch on Wyre Street. a gruesome discovery was about to be made. There on a stone slab lay a charred, headless, torso of man. It was naked except for a pair of Marks & Spencer underpants.

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Traces of petrol and two spent matches were found near the body. It was the beginning of a remarkable murder investigation that would take astonishing twists including rumours of financial corruption, arms deals, business feuds and a double shooting in London.

But in the immediate aftermath, Greater Manchester Police had a more pressing problem to solve. They had a body but no idea who it belonged to. As police converged on the station, Det Chief Insp Ron Dewin appealed for information.

"The head could be anywhere, which makes the search extremely difficult," he said. "This victim was not elderly or a vagrant, there will be someone somewhere whose son husband or brother is missing."

Six weeks later and 70 miles away, retired school caretaker Roy Jones was walking his dog, Mickey, near the corner of a high school sports field in Cheslyn Hay, just yards from the M6 motorway in South Staffordshire. Mickey began to scratch at the ground and at first Mr Jones thought his dog had discovered a severed sheep's head.

When he looked closer he recoiled in horror. It was the head of a man. "I didn't know what to think and just stood looking at the sky for about five minutes," he said. "I couldn't believe my eyes.

"I had only gone out to take Mickey for his daily morning walk and ended up seeing the most horrific thing I'd ever come across."

Police would later speculate it had been hurled into the field from a passing car on the motorway. However the head got there, the killer had gone to great lengths to disguise his victim's identity.

Officers at the time described the killing as 'non-professional, but methodical'. The head was badly mutilated and shattered into around 100 pieces, but the person had had extensive dental work.

A rare metal alloy had been used in the dentistry which meant police were able to establish the dead man was from Kuwait. DNA samples were then matched to those from the Manchester torso.

But who was it? The next step by police was to commission Manchester University professor Richard Neave, a forensic facial reconstruction expert, to create a clay model of the head.

The model was released to the media in April 1994. The unusual move paid dividends.

After the papers ran the photo, police received a phone call from a lawyer, who thought the features matched those of a client. He was convinced it was Kuwaiti millionaire Adnan Abdul Hameed Al-Sane, 46, a former banker who had moved to London in 1986.

Police quickly established that Mr Al-Sane, said to have a fortune of around £20m, was missing. He had not been seen since meeting a Kuwaiti business associate on December 14, 1993 at the Britannia Hotel in Grosvenor Square, London.

Mr Al-Sane had left at midnight in a taxi. When police searched his home - a luxury rented flat in the Maida Vale district of London's West End, where he lived alone, there was no sign of any struggle. But six boxes of files relating to his stocks and shares were missing.

Detectives formed the opinion that he had been snatched from his apartment. Det Supt Bernard Rees from GMP, said at the time: "Financial motive is the only one I can think of."

The plot thickened, when, in April 1994, a once close associate of Mr Al-Sane - against whom he had filed a £600,000 lawsuit following a falling out - was shot in Paddington, London. The man was hit four times and the woman he was with twice, but both survived.

The two-would be assassins who carried out the attack in Paddington were said to be of Middle Eastern appearance. Mr Al-Sane was said to have retired from banking at the age of just 38.

He spent his time playing the stock market and visiting casinos. Relatives told police he owned property in Britain, France, Jordan, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

A member of a leading Kuwaiti merchant family, he was reported to have left his homeland after becoming embroiled in a scandal involving the collapse of that country's stock market in 1982.

He had no links to either Manchester or South Staffordshire. There was speculation - but no proof - that he may have been involved in arms deals.

One theory is that the seeds for the killing were sown in the world of high finance in Kuwait. The dispersal of his body may have been an attempt to shift suspicion, geographically at least, away from that world.

Whatever the motives for his murder, the killers and those who commissioned them have never been identified.