The brutal battle for supremacy between rival Liverpool gangs is in part down to the recent success of police operations in taking out key players in the drugs market, youth workers and crime experts have told Sky News.

About two years ago, a rupture happened in Liverpool’s underworld.

Police infiltrated an encrypted messaging service called EncroChat, used internationally by criminals.

In the UK, around three quarters of the messages about gun crime had links to Liverpool and the North West.

Operation Venetic was launched; a national operation that led to hundreds of arrests across the country.

Craig Turner, deputy director of the National Crime Agency, said: “Operation Venetic has really opened law enforcement’s and the National Crime Agency’s and partners’ eyes to what’s been going in criminal networks, and how they operate within the UK.”

He added: “It identified how they managed to speak to each other in a clandestine way, how they managed to do their various deals within the UK and internationally, the amount of drugs that are being dealt quite openly on the platform, how they deal with firearms coming into the country and within the UK.”

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Merseyside Police was already focused on dismantling county lines drug networks, but the decrypted messages between criminals gave them intelligence and evidence to arrest players high up the chain.

However, that hasn’t depleted the drugs market.

Youth intervention worker Paul Walmsley, who works for Halcyon Days and Nobody Left Behind, says the next generation are looking to fill the supply gaps.

He told Sky News: “That’s going to be backfilled with younger people from the estates who are coming up through the ranks.

“And they have to do something to gain significance in that group. And all disputes are settled with either knives or guns.”

Organised criminals may supply the weapons, but turf wars are disorganised.

Most shootings in the UK are committed by street gangs, and victims are generally known to the police – but the rivalries are often as chaotic as they are brutal.

It’s rare, but sometimes that chaos strays into the lives of ordinary innocent people, with tragic consequences.

Tony Saggers, the former NCA lead on drugs threat and intelligence, says even hardened criminals won’t tolerate the callous killing of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel.

He said: “I have every confidence, that someone from the Liverpool area, who knows who has done this, will come forward. Because it’s my view that even the most senior and organised criminals will find this as abhorrent as we do.”

Liverpool is famous for many positive things but, though we are far from understanding the motives, this appalling crime has once again exposed a dreadful underbelly that is blighting the community.

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