TWO men accused of a £100,000 antiques shop burglary in the Cotswolds almost a year ago have been declared not guilty after the prosecution dramatically dropped the case against them.

Prosecutor Virginia Cornwall told Gloucester Crown Court she was not proceeding with the case because there was an 'issue with the reliability of the identification evidence' against the two defendants, Vincent Smith, 41, of Cartwright Road, Churchdown, and Steven Agg, 33, of Moors Avenue, Cheltenham.

Accordingly, she said, the Crown Prosecution Service was offering no evidence.

Mr Smith and Mr Agg had both been charged with breaking into Mickleton Antiques on 16 or 17 October 2022 and stealing £100,000 worth of silver and gold.

Mr Smith, who was in court at Cirencester for yesterday's hearing, said he had always maintained that a specific police officer had 'falsely identified' him as one of the burglars.

But it could not have been him, he said, because he was in Bristol at the time. Because of the identification he had spent most of the time since his arrest on electronic tag and forbidden from associating with his friend Mr Agg, he told the court.

He alleged that the officer who had named him as one of the burglars had also wrongly identified him in an earlier case.

"It's time someone did something about it," he added.

He thanked Ms Cornwall and the Crown Prosecution Service for discontinuing the case.

The judge, Recorder Richard Mawhinney, formally entered not guilty verdicts in favour of both Mr Smith and Mr Agg, who was not present at court but was represented by a barrister.

Recorder Mawhinney told Mr Smith that his bail conditions were now lifted and unless there were any other court orders in place he was free to make contact with Mr Agg again.

Mr Smith said that Mr Agg had been so affected by the charge against him that he had been living rough and 'has not got a clue what is going on.'

He said he had been 'in tears' over Mr Agg's plight but had not been able to contact him because of the court bail conditions. He checked with the Recorder that he would now be able to go looking for his friend and was told he could.

At an earlier Crown Court hearing the judge was told that extensive scientific enquiries were under way including DNA and fingerprint evidence recovered from items at the scene and also from a recycling bag found in Cheltenham shortly after the burglary.

The prosecution said voice recognition analysis had also been commissioned in relation to Mr Smith's and Mr Agg's voices compared with the voices heard on CCTV of the burglary.

Radio frequency analysis was also being carried out on locations where the two defendants allegedly assembled before and after the burglary, the court was told at that time.

Mickleton Antiques was closed immediately after the raid but reopened on October 19th last year.