CONFUSION AND controversy still surrounds the shooting dead of an Irishman and two others by police in Bolivia on Thursday.
Police have said the three men were mercenaries and they died after an alleged shoot-out in a hotel in the eastern city of Santa Cruz. Two supposed accomplices were arrested after the shooting.
The dead Irishman has been named as 24-year-old Michael Dwyer from Ballinderry, Co Tipperary. His family released a statement at the weekend saying they were “shocked and devastated by the tragic death of a beloved son and brother”.
Mr Dwyer’s father, Martin, is an electrician while his mother, Caroline, is a pharmaceutical engineer. The couple have three other children: Aisling (25), Ciara (21) and Emmet (14).
Dermot Ryan, spokesman for the Dwyers, said the family is still not clear on the events surrounding the violent death and are focusing on trying to get Michael’s body home.
“There’s just so many different stories on it now,” Mr Ryan said.
“I think that so much of it is not going to come out for a long time and probably some of it is never going to come out. They’re [the family] just trying not to focus on any speculation.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs said of the repatriation of Mr Dwyer’s remains: “Normally these things take a while no matter what the circumstances are surrounding a death. It is quite difficult to move a body between countries.”
The other men killed along with Mr Dwyer were identified as a Hungarian citizen and Eduardo Rózsa Flores (49), who police say was the leader of the group.
A well-known journalist originally from Santa Cruz, Flores held a Croatian passport and fought in the Balkans conflict. He had not lived in Bolivia for more than 10 years, according to family members. He was buried on Friday evening in Santa Cruz.
At his funeral, his sister told local media: “I do not believe my brother was a terrorist. He was a writer.”
In a press conference on Thursday, Alvaro Garcia Linera, Bolivia’s vice-president, said the men’s planned goal was to destabilise the country’s left-wing government and that they had attempted to assassinate Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
Mr Morales linked the men killed and arrested on Thursday to his right-wing opponents, whom he has regularly accused of trying to overthrow him since he took power in January 2006.
But Bolivia’s elite anti-crime police unit said an examination of a computer found in the hotel listed five targets in the city of Santa Cruz, including local governor Rubén Costas, Mr Morales’s main political opponent, but not the president himself or other members of his government.
There are also conflicting reports about whether the two men arrested after the shooting have confessed to two recent bomb attacks – against a government minister and Santa Cruz’s cardinal who is considered close to the opposition – as initially reported by police.
Oscar Ortiz, the leader of the opposition-controlled senate, called for international criminal investigators to come to Bolivia, saying he did not trust the country’s own police.
The opposition has questioned the fact that local Santa Cruz police have been excluded from all participation in the operation which has been run by elite units from the capital of La Paz.
The two men arrested were quickly flown to the capital and are now being held in a maximum security prison.
Mr Ortiz suggested that the men killed and arrested may have been involved in drug trafficking and that the government was using Thursday’s incident to create a “show” and smear the opposition.
The east of Bolivia is a major transhipment point for Bolivian and Peruvian cocaine on its way to Brazil and Europe, and local and international drug cartels have long been entrenched in the area.
Santa Cruz is the main centre of opposition to the indigenous -dominated government led by Mr Morales.
Its right-wing political leadership heads a movement for greater autonomy by the mestizo-dominated east of the country. This issue has been a constant source of political tension between it and the indigenous majority in the west.