A motorcyclist from Clapham who taunted a patrol car into chasing him before hitting 189mph on a single-carriageway road has been jailed after admitting 21 counts of dangerous driving.
Amin Belechguer was spotted on his £19,500 Kawasaki Ninja H2r along the A20 Ashford Road in Kent with no registration plate. When a patrol car pulled up behind him, lights flashing and sirens sounding, he moved in front of it and waved at the officers, goading them into a pursuit.
It happened on 27 June last year. Belechguer accelerated hard down the single carriageway, where speed limits vary between 40mph and 60mph, and at points topped 130mph.
GoPro footage revealed 189mph
Officers quickly decided the chase was too risky to continue and called it off, radioing for backup and deploying a stinger. Moments later Belechguer was brought to a stop and arrested.
It was only after the arrest that the full picture emerged. Seized alongside the bike was a GoPro camera, and the footage on it documented speeds well beyond anything the officers had witnessed — up to 189mph.
His phone was also seized at the scene. The three devices together gave investigators a picture of a rider who had deliberately sought out the chase and recorded himself doing it.
Belechguer pleaded guilty to 21 counts of dangerous driving. He was sentenced at Maidstone Crown Court on Wednesday, where the court heard the confiscated bike would be permanently forfeited to the state.
Bike confiscated for good
In addition to the custodial sentence, the Kawasaki was made the subject of a forfeiture order, meaning it will not be returned. The forfeiture of vehicles used in serious driving offences is a power courts can use alongside prison time, and it sends a pointed message: the machine that enabled the crime does not go back to its owner.
PC Daniel Goodman, the investigating officer, said: “Officers worked swiftly when presented with the opportunity to arrest a dangerous motorist.”
The track-only superbike on a public road
The machine at the centre of the case is worth a moment’s reflection. The Ninja H2r is the track-only sibling of Kawasaki’s celebrated Ninja H2 — a supercharged, litre-class superbike built for closed circuits and never intended for public roads. That goes some way to explaining why it was running without a registration plate: it was never road legal in the first place.
On a race track with run-off areas and no oncoming traffic, 189mph is the H2r’s natural habitat. On a single-carriageway A-road with 40mph limits and farm traffic, it is an entirely different proposition. At that speed a rider covers roughly two and a half miles in a minute, and the margin for error — for the rider and for everyone else on the road — is essentially nil.
Sentencing repeat dangerous driving
Dangerous driving carries a maximum of two years’ imprisonment per count on summary trial and unlimited fines, but cases of this scale — 21 counts, speeds of nearly three times the national limit, and conduct that actively invited a police pursuit — are sentenced on indictment, where the court has far more serious powers at its disposal.
Courts routinely treat speeds above 100mph on public roads as a marker of the gravest offending, and the combination of a taunting gesture at officers, a stinger deployment and video evidence of 189mph will have left the judge with little room for leniency.
The case also underlines how dashcam and bodycam-style footage has changed road-policing prosecutions. Where dangerous driving once came down to officers’ recollections, the GoPro on the handlebars supplied an exact record of the speeds involved — evidence that proved decisive at sentencing.
Another custodial sentence handed down this week saw a 70-year-old jailed for three years over the theft of a 350-year-old map from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. London courts have also been busy with transport crime: a knife robber was jailed for four and a half years after targeting Tube passengers, while a door-handle thief caught at a Herne Hill estate was sent down alongside a Whitechapel drug dealer.
