Stabbed lawyer Peter Maine ‘may have killed himself’, police say

A solicitor at the centre of a fraud investigation may have stabbed himself to death, police said.

Peter Maine, 56, was found with three stab wounds by a river in Durham in September. No weapon has been found, but police say one theory is the wounds were “self-inflicted” and that the weapon was disposed of before he died.

The father-of-two, who lived in Wynyard village near Stockton, was one of a number of people arrested in a long-running investigation into alleged mortgage fraud across the North East, Durham Police said.