Irish police said they are keeping an open mind after dissident republican terrorists claimed they murdered a gangster at a Dublin hotel during a weigh-in for a boxing match.
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Gunmen who dressed in women’s clothes and SWAT team uniforms attacked a boxing event armed with “AK-47-style” rifles and handguns, leaving one man dead and two more injured.
It came ahead of a Battle of the Families boxing fight between Portuguese fighter Antonio Joao Bento and Dubliner Jamie Kavanagh.
Gardai believe that at least six people were involved in the shooting.
Police said they were called to the Regency Hotel in north Dublin at around 2:30 pm (1430 GMT) where they found three injured men, all in their 20s or 30s. It wasn’t clear whether they opened fire, were working as scouts for the other gunmen, or had come to the event armed and in disguise in anticipation of trouble from a rival gang.
In the immediate aftermath Byrne’s murder was reportedly linked to a gangland feud between major organised crime outfits in Dublin and the south of Spain with speculation that it was retaliation for the murder of 34-year-old Gary Hutch at the Angel de Miraflores apartment complex, near Marbella, in September last year. One was declared dead at the scene, while two others were hospitalized with serious gunshot wounds.
“[The gunman] said something to me but I don’t know what he even said, I can’t remember at this point, I just know I’ve never felt terror like it, I was really, really scared and then after that it was just silence”.
Hutch’s murder brings to three the number of men killed in the emerging gun feud that senior gardaí believe has the potential to dwarf the well-documented gangland disputes in Limerick and in the neighbouring Dublin suburbs of Crumlin and Drimnagh.
A Gardai statement said: “Gardaí at Fitzgibbon St in Dublin are investigating a shooting incident which occurred at Poplar Row, North Strand, Dublin 3 at approximately 7.45pm this evening”.
The president of the Boxing Union of Ireland, Mel Christie, said it was obvious that the boxers were not the targets of the shooting on this occasion.
The public awoke on Saturday morning to newspapers filled with photographs of the gunmen entering and fleeing the hotel. “There was a horrific cracking noise in front of me”, he told the Press Association.
“When I was leaving about 20 minutes later, I could see a corpse slumped against the reception desk”.
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Kavanagh later tweeted: “Anyone asking I’m OK! His face was completely distorted, is what I can say about it”.
