LIMERICK STABBINGS:THE MAN suspected of killing two women and two young children at a house in Newcastle West in Co Limerick was in hospital last night as gardaí continued to investigate the circumstances surrounding their deaths.
The chief suspect has a number of previous convictions for minor offences including theft, fraud and forgery.
It is understood gardaí are investigating reports that the man (31) took a knife from the house in Meadow Court which he used to kill Sarah Hines (25), her two children, three-year-old Reece and five-month-old Amy Hines, and their mother’s friend, Alicia Brough (20) from Rockchapel, Co Cork.
The bodies of the four victims were found at Ms Hines’s rented house at Hazelgrove, Newcastle West, on Tuesday afternoon.
Gardaí are investigating the possibility that the murders may have been committed on Monday night and that the bodies of the four victims were left in the house overnight.
Gardaí were first notified at 1.35pm on Tuesday by a retired garda.
He had received a call from the suspect informing him of what had taken place at the house.
The suspect was arrested just over two hours later in a public house in Kilkee, Co Clare, after gardaí traced the call he made from a public phone box in the seaside resort.
State Pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy arrived in Newcastle West at 12.30pm yesterday to conduct postmortems on the two women and two children.
The four victims were stabbed to death in what local people have described as the single worst incident of violence to have occurred in Limerick in living memory.
It is believed all four suffered multiple stab wounds.
As the bodies were being transferred to the Mid Western Regional Hospital in Limerick, the man arrested in west Clare on Tuesday was receiving medical attention at Cork University Hospital.
Questioning was suspended yesterday when he was transferred to hospital.
It is understood he suffered an injury to his hand before he was arrested, which required plastic surgery.
A Garda spokesman said the postmortems were ongoing last night but added that the results would not be confirmed for a number of days.
It is not yet known when the bodies will be released to their families.
Gardaí have not confirmed whether the murder weapon was found during searches carried out at the scene yesterday, but a number of items were taken from the house for further technical examination.
“It is a domestic scene so there is a lot of items which we will be examining,” the Garda spokesman said.
House-to-house inquiries continued at at the Hazelgrove estate last night.