An alleged gang leader, who is accused of playing a significant role in several of the bloodiest feuds in the State, remains in Garda custody following his arrest this week.
The Dublin man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was detained in Dublin under organised crime legislation as part of an operation targeting a criminal group.
He was arrested as part of a wide-ranging investigation in criminal operations in the northeast of the country, particularly the Drogheda area.
The suspect was detained by detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI) on Thursday.
RM Block
Two other people, a man and a woman, were also arrested under anti-gangland powers earlier in the week. The pair have since been released and a file is being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The man arrested on Thursday remains in custody under organised crime legislation which allows suspects to be detained for up to seven days.
He has been tied by gardaí to at least a dozen murders and is considered one of the most dangerous criminals in the State.
However, so far investigators have been unable to build a strong enough case against him to warrant serious charges.
The man has not been publicly linked to organised crime to date. While he has appeared before the courts before, this has been on relatively minor charges.
Detectives now believe they are on the verge of a breakthrough in the case, after obtaining what they believe are encrypted communications sent by the man relating to organised crime.
The man, who is aged in his 40s, is suspected of involvement in some of the most high-profile murders in the State. These include the 2012 murder of Real IRA leader Alan Ryan and his brother Vincent Ryan four years later.
More recently, he was suspected of ordering the murder of notorious Dublin criminal Robbie Lawlor in Belfast in 2020.
Lawlor was shot dead after ordering the murder of 17-year-old Keane Mulready Woods, whose dismembered remains were found in several locations earlier in the year.
As well as murder, the arrested man is suspected of involvement of armed robberies, tiger kidnappings and large scale cocaine importation.
Gardaí have been building a case against the arrested man relating to Lawlor’s murder for the last several years. Much of it is based on communications sent by the suspect and other criminals through the EncroChat network.
EncroChat was an encrypted messaging network popular among organised criminals due to its perceived secrecy. However in 2020, European police forces infiltrated the network and extracted millions of messages between criminals, leading to hundreds of arrests across the continent.
Following the operation, gardaí obtained a large amount of intelligence on Irish criminals from their European counterparts. Some of the material appeared to link the arrested man to organised crime activity, including the murder of Lawlor.
Last year, gardaí working with the PSNI, carried out searches of several properties in the Republic including some linked to the arrested man.
The man is now subject to two separate investigations. One relates to the direction of a criminal organisation. The other relates to Lawlor’s murder.
