Gardaí are investigating a possible personal motive for the shooting dead of a man in Dublin last evening. The 41-year-old victim was fatally wounded by a lone gunman on Ballycoolin Road, Finglas, at around 5pm.
The victim is from the Finglas area and is not being named by The Irish Times until all of his family members have been informed.
Gardaí believe the dead man was in dispute with a man well-known to him and are working on the theory that may have been the motive for the murder. However, sources stressed the investigation was at a very early stage, adding the victim’s recent activities would need to be fully investigated before a motive for his killing could be confirmed. The victim was taken from the scene by ambulance to James Connolly Memorial Hospital but was pronounced dead there and a murder investigation was begun immediately.
The State Pathologist’s Office had last night been informed of the killing and a post mortem on the dead man’s remains was due to get underway this morning. The road where the shooting occurred remained sealed off overnight and was preserved with protective sheeting pending the arrival of the Garda Technical Bureau.
Members of the bureau were this morning due to commence a forensic examination of the area. The road closure covered the stretch from the Premier Business Park to the Cappagh Road, and was expected to cause considerable traffic disruption this morning.
Gardaí were also due to begin examining CCTV footage of access points to and from the road where the fatal attack occurred in an effort to establish how the killer got to and from the scene and if he had assistance in that regard. While the Finglas area has seen a large number of gangland-style killings in the past decade because of drug related gun feuding, the violence has waned in recent years following the murders of Martin Marlo Hyland in 2006 and Eamon Dunne in 2010. Both men led the same Finglas-based gang for over 10 years, with that group behind most of the gun attacks in the north Dublin suburb during that time since the late 1990s.
However, since Dunne’s murder in a pub in Cabra, north Dublin, in April 2010, the killings have not been as frequent.
