GARDAÍ AND Department of Foreign Affairs officials are due to confirm to the Bolivian authorities that a man shot dead in a clash between police and alleged anti-government mercenaries was a 25-year-old from Co Tipperary.
The Bolivian police have named him as Michael Martin Dwyer.
They have said the deceased’s Irish passport was found among his personal items after he and two of his associates were fatally wounded in what they said was a shoot-out with police in a hotel in the city of Santa Cruz on Thursday morning.
Two other suspects – accused of being part of a group of mercenaries hired to kill president Evo Morales – were arrested and taken in for questioning.
A member of the family of Michael Dwyer (25), from Ballinderry, near Borrisokane, Co Tipperary, confirmed last night that he had died in unexplained circumstances while travelling in Bolivia.
The Department of Foreign Affairs last night confirmed that an Irishman had been involved in a “violent incident” in Bolivia.
A spokesman for the Department said an official from the Irish Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina was travelling to Bolivia to investigate the matter.
Garda sources said the Interpol office in the Bolivian capital La Paz had sent a formal request to the agency’s office in Dublin asking for the Garda’s assistance in confirming the identity of the deceased as that on the passport recovered.
Sources said initial checks on Garda databases had thrown up no information on Mr Dwyer.
Gardaí will now liaise with the people who they believe to be Mr Dwyer’s family in Co Tipperary.
Alvaro Garcia Linera, Bolivia’s vice-president, claimed at a press conference on Thursday that “a band of terrorist mercenaries, Croatians, Irish and Bolivians” had tried to kill President Evo Morales, and intended to destabilise the country’s left-wing government.
Police say that along with a large cache of weapons, they recovered a list of targets that included Mr Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
In a press conference in Venezuela where he is attending a regional summit, Mr Morales said Bolivia’s police had the group under surveillance since April 3rd and he gave the order to arrest them.
It is understood some of the group had been working in private security in the US. The two other men killed in the shoot-out were a Hungarian man and a Bolivian man with Croatian citizenship who had fought in the Balkan wars.
A page on a social networking site created by Mr Dwyer was taken down last night. It contained a number of pictures of him with friends in Bolivia which were posted earlier this year.
Some of the photographs also showed Mr Dwyer, a university graduate recently living in Galway, dressed in combat fatigues and carrying imitation weapons with friends at what appeared to be a mock war game at an adventure sports facility.
