A drug dealer who absconded from prison while on temporary release is a key player in a South American cocaine cartel and travelled the world working for the gang, it has emerged.
The inmate, Juan Carlos Melgar Alba (42), a Bolivian national, has not been seen since he absconded from a prison work party 10 days ago.
He was an expert in a complex procedure involving the manipulation of chemicals to process cocaine. He used his skills so often that a portion of his finger prints had been burnt off by the chemicals, including acids and ammonia.
Melgar Alba was one of a number of inmates who had been granted temporary release from Mountjoy Prison to assist in the building of a community centre in Ballymun, Dublin.
However, when prison staff were taking the inmates back to Mountjoy last Tuesday week they realised Melgar Alba had fled. Gardaí were alerted immediately but a search for him has yielded nothing.
He was serving an eight-year sentence and was not due for release until July 2009. Opposition parties criticised his temporary release, saying it undermined the hardline approach the State was supposed to be taking to drug dealers.
It has now emerged that Melgar Alba was a vital member of a South American gang that imported cocaine into various countries by soaking garments in a cocaine-rich liquid. Once the drug had dried into the fabric, the clothes were exported.
When the clothing had reached their destination country, Melgar Alba travelled there and used his expertise to extract the drug in an elaborate process using chemicals. It was while extracting the drug from a batch of imported clothing in Kilkenny in 2003 that he was detected by gardaí and arrested.
Reliable sources have told The Irish Timesthat Melgar Alba had used chemicals so often to extract cocaine from batches of clothing around the world that portions of his fingerprints had been burnt off by the process.
It is unclear where he has fled but Garda and other security sources believe the cartel he worked for was so well-resourced and valued him so highly that his escape was most likely carefully planned.
"He was probably over the Border into the North and on to a plane or a boat before anybody even noticed he was gone," said one source.
The extraction process in which he was involved operated from a flat in Greensbridge, Kilkenny.
Other residents in the block noticed the smell of the chemicals being used and gardaí were alerted.
They arrested Melgar Alba close to the flat. His fingerprints were later found on the equipment in the apartment. Cocaine with a street value of €255,700 was seized at the premises during the raid on July 16th, 2003.
Melgar Alba had arrived in Ireland just three days earlier. He made contact with some people in Dublin, and on July 16th travelled to Kilkenny with two men but was arrested later that day.
Melgar Alba had been a model inmate since his imprisonment and had earned the status of "trustee" prisoner. This entitled him to a number of privileges, including temporary release.
He had been part of the working party from which he absconded for 10 weeks.
The vast majority of temporary releases pass without incident, with inmates returning to jail at their agreed times.