On the third hit they finally got Clifton 'Junior' Bryan, the fourth to die in the Leeds gang war

Down in the drains of Leeds yesterday, police were beginning to investigate how luck had finally run out on a man with a hold on life that rivalled Rasputin's.

Would-be killers had tried twice before to dispose of Clifton "Junior" Bryan. In his most recent escape two months ago, they opened up with a handgun and a shotgun. But the sheer physical strength of the 29-year-old Afro-Caribbean allowed him to escape and get to hospital, shotgun pellets peppering his back and two pistol bullets lodged in his stomach.

As Mr Bryan recovered, he was guarded by armed officers. But later he rejected West Yorkshire Police protection.

By comparison, there was something respectfully serene about the way he finally washed up dead on Monday. Probably shot on Sunday, along with another man, somewhere between Leeds and Manchester, his body was laid out in a P-registered Rover 220 car neatly parked in the Harehills area of Leeds on Monday morning. A man walking his dog at 5.50am found the corpse.

"We were beginning to think he was the Sandman," said Detective Chief Superintendent Grahame Bullock, as he began the hunt for the assassin, yesterday. "He was a big, big powerful man and his strength might have got him out of this kind of situation in the past."

To the ordinary people of Leeds, Mr Bryan's midas touch adds a certain fascination to a murder inquiry which began 20ft beneath the streets of Darfield Street, where rubber-suited underwater search teams yesterday scoured the drains for forensic evidence near the parked car.

But his death represents a troubling escalation of gang war in a city which could well do without it.

After 10 years in which such incidents had been "highly unusual", said Mr Bullock, four people have now been shot dead and six seriously injured in two months. West Yorkshire Police are prickly about the coincidence of the latest attack, which appeared to underline the comments of Police Federation chairman Fred Broughton. He said urban areas such as the centres of London, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds were no-go areas because of violence and lack of police presence.

"Sometimes comments like that can be unhelpful," said Mr Bullock. "We are not in the middle of anarchy on the streets of Leeds. We've had a number of specifically targeted attacks on known individuals. That doesn't suggest anarchy to me."

But the first attempt on Mr Bryan's life - when he and an associate were shot at through his car window outside St James' Hospital casualty department in Leeds seven years ago - suggests such attacks are not necessarily confined to a shadowy world of rival drug gangs fighting over fiercely guarded local territories.

The renewed spate of apparent gangland shootings began on 12 March when a 41-year-old man was shot in the legs outside a pub in Moortown.

Three days later, car dealer Craig Mirfield, 34, was blasted to death in his motor as he tried to dodge a gunman near his home in Gipton. Then Mr Bryan was attacked again in Chapeltown.

The next victim was a 29-year-old man, shot and wounded at his home in the city on 27 March (a man has been charged with attempted murder). On 12 April, a man of 23 was shot in the leg as he opened his door in Harehills. More shots were reported to police later that evening in Old Colton village.

Then, on 16 April, known gangster Frank Birley, also called Frank Gatt, was murdered. Two weeks ago, a 29-year-old man was shot in both legs by three masked men who lay in wait for him at his home in the city.

Such crimes go more against the grain in Leeds than in Manchester, which has become slightly re-accustomed to such incidents. Its own escalation saw 41 people shot last year including three killed over 10 days last year. The pattern has continued this year, prompting fears of a spiral similar to the Eighties era of gangland turf wars which earned the city its "Gunchester" tag.

Bar the usual territorial spats, Leeds has been above all that, re-emerging from the devastating shrinkage of manufacturing industries more spectacularly than perhaps any northern city. Its urban waterways, the river Aire and Leeds Liverpool canal, once heaving with cargo from the steel, coal and textiles industries, now the site of the sophisticated Calls and Riverside urban renewal projects, best tellits story.

Old warehouses have become bars and restaurants, galleries, hotels and homes for city centre dwellers, many employed by Leeds' financial services sector which many say is second to the City.

A much-feted northern outpost for Harvey Nicks and 36,000 new jobs created since 1991 - no UK city has grown faster. If things don't overheat - and some analysts have detected punitive labour and property market costs - a further 30,000 jobs are predicted for Leeds by 2006. Even football, once a game of flat caps and terraces, shares in all this sophistication.

Leeds United Football Club used to be known for little more than success, crunching tackles and meat pies, yet there was a typical "new Leeds" symbolism to the news yesterday that the football club is to invest a 25 per cent share in the sophisticated new restaurant, Teatro Leeds.

It is being set up by former centre-forward Lee Chapman. "It's great to be back [in Leeds]," said Mr Chapman yesterday. "This city has such a vibe, it is definitely the London of the north." Like many other local venues, the restaurant will be at The Quays, on the banks of the Aire.

The police force in this chic city was not attributing the new escalation in gangland crime to the same social factors which have worried detectives in Manchester this year.

A senior Greater Manchester Police officer, investigating the eighth fatal shooting in seven months, warned in January that weapons had become "a culture, a respect thing" for young criminals. The gun, he said "is sometimes seen as an accessory - almost a fashion accessory - and is sometimes used to demand respect from [their] peer group."

By contrast, Mr Bullock attributed the shootings to "a bit of territory, a bit of drug trade and arguing between the criminal fraternity". Armed police patrols were sent into parts of Manchester after shootings earlier this year, but for Leeds, Mr Bullock said it would be "business as usual". The people of Harehills, watching from their gardens as frogmen continued their murder investigation in hot sunshine, seemed less convinced. "This is a reasonable nice area and for something like this to happen is really frightening," said 27-year-old Joanne Cooper, one of the few who felt safe enough to give a name.

"It was terrible to wake up on Monday and hear what had happened," said another man. "Sometimes you think it is not safe to step outside any more."