A police officer broke down yesterday as he described how James Holmes ‘smiled and smirked’ moments after allegedly shooting dead 12 people and injuring 58 when he opened fire at a Colorado cinema.

In the first extensive courtroom account of the massacre in Aurora on July 20 last year, police officers who were first on the scene and arrested Holmes found him to be ‘detached’ and ‘out of it"’ while wearing head-to-toe body armour.