The pair crashed through a fence and the policeman held the struggling man as other officers rushed to his aid.

The man had fled from the scene of the murder in Alma Street, Gosport, jumping through back gardens and sprinting down paths and back roads.

He barged through the back door of a woman's house in Whitworth Road and ran across the road with wads of cash falling from his pockets.

He threw himself between bushes and the wooden fence of Tyre Stocks Ltd in Whitworth Close.

A 16-year-old employee at the tyre centre spotted him and shouted to a policeman passing on a motorbike.

The officer jumped from his bike and rugby tackled the man, sending them both crashing through the fence.

The tyre centre worker said: 'I was pretty scared at this point, because the guy who was hiding just looked me straight in the eye, I had no idea what he was going to do. Then the policeman got off his bike and just rugby tackled him through the fence. It was quite amazing how he did it.'

The arrest was the third made by the police in relation to the brutal killings yesterday, with two earlier arrests made near the scene of the crime.

The first man to be arrested was in a nearby road, then police tracked down the second suspect and arrested him at a house in the area.

The three men – a 27-year-old, from Gosport, and a 19 and 21-year-old, both from London – were arrested on suspicion of murder. They were yesterday being kept at three different police stations in our area.