A SECURITY guard from Prestwich, jailed for 14 years for being the "insider" in a £6.6 million armoured car robbery faces an anxious wait to clear his name.

The gang who carried out the gunpoint raid in Salford in July 1995 were never caught, but Graham Huckerby, who was guarding the van at the time, was jailed along with Bury man James Power for assisting the robbers.

Huckerby (43), of Clifton Road, Prestwich was convicted of conspiracy to rob at Manchester Crown Court and jailed for 14 years in April 2002. Power (61), of Hornby Street, received the same sentence.

Both men have insisted they had nothing to do with the raiders and claimed they are victims of a serious miscarriage of justice.

But after two days of intense legal debate at London's Court of Appeal last week, Lord Justice Potter, Mr Justice Gibbs and Sir Michael Wright left the pair on tenterhooks when they reserved their decision until a later, unspecified, date.

Huckerby was convicted of being in cahoots with the gang. The prosecution said he allowed them access to the vehicle, but he has always maintained he let them in because they pointed a gun at him and told him they had taken his colleague hostage.

Power, who was unemployed, was linked to the robbery by phone calls made between him and Huckerby after the crime. The prosecution also said thousands of pounds passed through both men's bank accounts following the robbery.

Huckerby was also said to have made a "confession" to a woman after the raid.

However Stephen Kamlish QC, for Huckerby, and Richard Harvey, for Power, both insisted their convictions were "unsafe" and urged the judges to set the record straight and clear them.

Mr Kamlish argued that Huckerby was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder both at the time of the trial and the robbery. That, he said, was due to an earlier raid on his van in November 1994 in which his partner had been stabbed. Mr Harvey also attacked the evidence against Power as flimsy.

However, Crown counsel, Mr Charles Garside QC, told the judges the fresh evidence which Huckerby now sought to put forward was inadmissable and irrelevant.

He said Huckerby's account that he allowed a robber into his cab because he believed a colleague was being held hostage and a robber brandishing a gun would have seen any attempt he made to activitate a "data track mechanism" had been considered, and rejected, by the jury.