MORE than £20,000 earned through selling drugs on the streets of Southampton must be paid back by a gang convicted of shooting dead a rival dealer.

Jemmikai Orlebar Forbes, Pierre Lewis and Isaac Boateng have been ordered to pay a total of £21,732.08 – nine months after they were found guilty of murdering Jahmel Jones in the city.

A confiscation hearing at Winchester Crown Court heard Orlebar-Forbes and Lewis must pay back £7,244.03 each while Boateng must pay back £7,244.02.

All three defendants appeared via a video link from separate prisons and only spoke to confirm their names and that they understood how much cash they will pay.

The court heard that the money is currently with the police, having been seized from a safe belonging to Boateng when the trio were arrested.

As previously reported, Mr Jones was killed when the trio lured him into a flat in St Mary Street and shot him twice on April 20, 2013.

Orlebar Forbes, 21, Lewis, 21, and Boateng, 23, made money by selling crack cocaine and heroin in the St Mary’s area of the city last year.

During the six-week trial earlier this year, the court heard how Mr Jones, who had the nickname “Lucky”, had also been selling drugs in the same area.

Orlebar Forbes, Lewis and Boateng fled to Basingstoke in a taxi after the shooting, where they were picked up by Lewis’s girlfriend Rachel Kenehan, a criminology lecturer and PhD student. Detectives launched a murder inquiry and enlisted the help of the Metropolitan Police after investigations revealed the killing was linked to drug gangs in the capital.

CCTV images were released of three men – wearing hooded jumpers, despite it being an unusually hot day – walking casually in the St Mary’s area of Southampton in the moments leading up to the shooting.

Lewis, of Barnes, Orlebar Forbes, of Balham, and Boateng, of Hounslow, were eventually tracked down days later along with Kenehan. Lewis, Boateng and Orlebar Forbes were found guilty of murder by a jury following the trial.

Mr Justice Keith sentenced Lewis to 29 years, handed Boateng 30 years and sentenced Orlebar Forbes, who pulled the trigger, to 31 years in custody.

Lewis was handed a further nine years for drugs charges, Boateng received eight years, while Orlebar Forbes was handed seven years.

Kenehan, 35, was handed a sentence of three-and-a-half years for her role in supporting their drugs enterprise and assisting the gang in the days after the shooting.