Following gunshots at a Garda sports club in Dublin in February, Nicolae Sobchenco was charged with the attempted murder of a former friend. He was found dead in prison a month ago. Beyond those facts, there are more questions than answers
ON THAT Sunday morning in February when Nicolae Sobchenco left his home in Leixlip for the last time and set off for Westmanstown Garda Club, his wife Ludmila barely noticed him leave. Detectives would spend months struggling to unpick the threads of that morning, but from where she stood it could scarcely have felt more mundane. Family friends would be celebrating their child’s birthday that afternoon, so Ludmila had baked a cake and was hurrying to get their four children ready for the party.
“My parents came to the house – they come every morning to say hello, to play with the children. It was like a normal Sunday,” she says in a soft Russian accent. “I asked them if they wanted a cup of tea, so I was making it, we were sitting here, and my husband left . . . He didn’t say anything that day. He just left.” She presumed he had gone to the shop.
About an hour later, a few miles away in Lucan, another Moldovan man and his family got into his black Mercedes and set out for Leixlip, where he would leave his wife to work before continuing to Westmanstown to take their three young children swimming.
Set on extensive grounds reached by way of sinuous back roads between Leixlip and Lucan in west Dublin, and comprising a golf course, GAA pitches, a gym and some tennis courts, the Westmanstown complex is at its busiest at weekends. The car park at the Garda club was nearly full when the Moldovan man and his children arrived that Sunday, February 22nd, but he found a space about 100m from the main building and reversed into it. The three girls – aged two, seven and 10 – were sitting in the back. As the car came to a halt the man was talking on his phone to a Romanian friend. During their conversation, the Romanian heard him telling one of his daughters to sit down before the phone suddenly went dead, and he didn’t call back.
At about the same time, housemates Sarah Murphy and Niamh Doyle stepped out of Crunch Fitness in the main building after dropping in to use the sunbeds. They had just about come alongside a black Mercedes when a man wearing a black hat stepped out from behind it.
The first sound was the smashing of glass. “It then dawned on me that he had a gun,” Murphy told gardaí. “The noise was not very loud. I think there were just two shots. The breaking of the glass was actually louder than the shots.”
Murphy grabbed her friend and crouched behind a car for cover, listening to the screams and what sounded like a tussle. Suddenly, there was movement all around. Two children were running from the scene – one of them was carrying a baby girl and all of them were crying. The middle child said her father had just been shot in the neck.
When the shots came at him through his car window, the Moldovan driver - heavily built, in his mid-30s - had pushed himself out through the driver’s door and started to wrestle with Nicolae Sobchenco - the man in black. He was screaming loudly – “I don’t know from pain or anger or both,” he said later.
A chaotic struggle ensued. Witnesses saw two guns, both of which gardaí later concluded Sobchenco had brought with him. A few feet away, Garda Alan Lynch, an off-duty officer who had just finished playing a football match for the Garda GAA club, had taken cover behind a car and was shouting at the men to drop any weapons. “Both men continued to struggle with each other. I again roared ‘gardaí’ but even so one of the men put the firearm he was holding to the other man’s head and pulled the trigger.” The gun jammed, so Sobchenco started to beat the other man across the head with it.
The two men continued to wrestle, their clothes covered in blood. When a gun fell to the ground with a clank, Garda Lynch saw his chance, ran towards the scuffle and kicked the weapon under a car. Jerome Twomey, an off-duty garda from Tallaght station who had grabbed his hurley stick from the boot of his car when he saw what was happening, followed suit, striking one of the men across the back with the stick while his colleague disarmed him and kicked a second gun out of their reach.
“I struck this male a couple of times as I was in fear of my life and was not sure whether these two men were in possession of another firearm,” said Garda Twomey. The man with gunshot wounds then rolled away and lay on his back, while more off-duty gardaí arrived and helped to restrain Nicolae Sobchenco.
“I got his arm behind his back and I closed the handcuff on his wrist,” recalled one garda. “I remember because his wrist was nearly too big for the cuff.” When the emergency call came through to Garda control, it was exactly 1pm. Two armed officers from the Special Detective Unit were on patrol in the area; they arrived within minutes, followed by a cavalcade of patrol cars and an ambulance. Some time after 2pm, Ludmila says, she called her husband’s mobile to see where he was. The phone was switched off. She and the four children left for the party without him. Within hours their house had been raided and the afternoon news bulletins had a new lead.
For four months, gardaí puzzled over what happened at Westmanstown that day, and what lay behind it. Who were Nicolae Sobchenco and the other man, and how did two legally resident Moldovans who had never come to the authorities’ attention find themselves this close to death in a car park of the Garda sports club on a quiet Sunday afternoon? The investigation began with two names and a blank page.
LUDMILA AND HER future husband met at school in Moldova and had lived together for 10 years before they married in 2002. After finishing school, Sobchenco – born to a Ukrainian father and a Bulgarian mother – did two years’ compulsory service in the Soviet-era army, though even then he spent most of his time practising his beloved judo, which he would later go on to compete in professionally.
“He was a good sportsman,” recalls Vladimir, his judo teacher in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital. “In the Soviet army, he had the second place in the country.”
Ludmila came to Ireland in 2000 and was followed a year later by her husband. They sought and were refused asylum, but secured residence because they had an Irish-born child (it was only later – in 2003 – that the Supreme Court ruled that the non-Irish parents of Irish children had no automatic right to remain here).
Sobchenco worked in a number of jobs in Ireland, at one time opening a car-repair garage and later, in 2007, setting up his own tiling company, according to records filed with the Companies Registration Office.
Sobchenco and the man he shot in Westmanstown knew each other well. They had been friends back home in Moldova, and relations between the two appear to have been good until they lost contact about two years ago. The shooting victim had come to Ireland around the same time as Sobchenco, in 2001, and worked as a mechanic in west Dublin. Both told gardaí after the February shooting that they had jointly run an informal business bringing packages – televisions, microwaves, clothes – back to Moldova from emigrants living in Ireland, but the arrangement seems to have petered out after two trips. “I don’t know whether it was a lucrative business or not, but I think it was something they were doing on the side,” says one garda.
In the mid-decade, both men found themselves part of a Moldovan community that was growing steadily, though their low numbers relative to other immigrant groups – the census in April 2006 put the total at 2,200, the great majority living around Dublin – and a general eschewing of representative groups has kept their profile low. Some of these Moldovans came through the asylum process, while others secured work permits, and a significant number are thought still to be living here without any papers, notwithstanding stories of the recession having led some of the undocumented to return to Moldova, Europe’s poorest state.
Younger members of the community often meet at a Russian nightclub in Swords, north Dublin, while Romanian Orthodox churches attract many Moldovans as well, but in general the community is quite dispersed and discreet. One Moldovan woman who knew neither Sobchenco nor the other man personally says that, although the men were reasonably well known, their compatriots were as shocked as anyone. There was also a fear that the incident would train an unflattering, and unwelcome, spotlight on the community. “People in the Moldovan community were very surprised. Many are illegals, and they try to stay clean and stay out of trouble . . . They have this fear of being exposed.”
SOBCHENCO HAD KEPT up his judo in Ireland, and he and another Moldovan friend had run a club in Leixlip for a few years.
Alan Martin, secretary of Judo Ireland, first met Sobchenco when he and a friend came to train with his group. “He was very talented. He was a terrific player, and particularly good at seoi nage – a shoulder throw,” Martin recalls. “He was very quiet – he hardly said a word. The other guy did most of the talking.”
Sobchenco had a big, stocky frame that made him look much slower than he was, Martin remarks. “When he was in a competition, he would start off giving that impression, but he was lightning quick.”
When the wounded Moldovan was rushed to hospital on February 22nd, medics found several bullet wounds in his chest and lacerations to his head, but he made a full recovery and gave gardaí a statement in which he said he hadn’t spoken to Sobchenco for some time and had no idea why he would want him killed. “He was not worried in the last few weeks or days, he did not seem to have anything on his mind,” a relative said.
Sobchenco, who had himself been injured in the scuffle, was also brought to hospital and kept under armed guard while he recovered. Interviewed at Lucan Garda station later in the week, he insisted the guns were not his and that it was the other man who had initiated the attack. Gardaí didn’t believe him, and felt witness statements and CCTV footage from the car park contradicted his defence. Neither man had ever come into contact with gardaí before, nor had they any previous convictions in Moldova, according to Interpol.
Two guns were found at the crime scene – a French-manufactured semi-automatic pistol with a silencer attached and a Russian-made semi-automatic Browning – and although gardaí initially suspected that each man had a gun (“it sounded just so wild to think that an individual would go up with two guns,” remarks a senior garda), they soon concluded that Sobchenco had brought both and shot through the car’s rear passenger window after approaching it from behind.
How Sobchenco got to Westmanstown remains something of a mystery, however. He claimed he walked, but none of the CCTV cameras lined along the route picked him up. “If you were going to go out and do something like that, first of all you wouldn’t use a place like that, or you wouldn’t do it with three children in a car, and then think that you were going to casually walk away,” says one garda. “It just doesn’t add up.”
But the biggest puzzle of all was the motive. Sobchenco gave a story, which his victim denied, and that gardaí could not corroborate. While gardaí suspected there was more to the story than they were being told, the deeper they delved, the more opaque the picture became.
SOBCHENCO SEEMS an unlikely assassin. The choice of Westmanstown – brimming with off-duty gardaí and surveyed by more cameras than a film set – was an astonishing one. It was reckless too, carried out with two guns just a few feet from the victim’s three daughters. Acquaintances say they were shocked by the incident and speak of Sobchenco as a devoted, hard-working family man with boundless generosity.
“He is a normal person – a good person,” says his wife Ludmila. One of the most difficult aspects of the case has been the portrayal of her husband as a criminal. “He was not a criminal . . . My husband was normal – very kind, very good. He lived a normal life with children, with family, with work.”
Alex, a close friend, says he noticed nothing unusual about Sobchenco’s behaviour when they met a few days before the Westmanstown incident. “Nothing strange,” he remembers. “He talked about work . . . We were just talking about how there’s no work and all that.”
While rumours have long circulated among Irish-based Moldovans of people within their community being involved in racketeering, gardaí do not suggest any evidence of a link to the Westmanstown case.
After being charged with unlawful possession of firearms, Nicolae Sobchenco was sent to Cloverhill Prison in Dublin to await trial. Ludmila visited him there every morning, chatting through a glass screen for up to 40 minutes each day. In jail, he took up English classes, spent a lot of time in the gym and, according to one prisoner who has since been released, was rarely seen without a book under his arm. His wife says he had plans to set up a judo club in Cloverhill.
Did he ever tell her what happened at Westmanstown? “No, and he every time said to me, ‘stay back from this case. Don’t do nothing.’ He was afraid about us.”
Her husband was in the habit of keeping his worries to himself, she says another day. “It was like there was a big wool around me, and I was so safe with him.”
On May 26th, Ludmila paid her daily visit to Cloverhill. A few days earlier, the Director of Public Prosecutions had upgraded the charges against her husband from unlawful possession of firearms to attempted murder, which meant that if he were found guilty, he could get a life sentence. Gardaí report a change in his behaviour after that, though Ludmila recalls no change in his mood. He had a slight headache that day – a recurring annoyance he put down to a thump he took during the February incident – and, after complaining that there was nothing but thrillers in the library, he asked her to bring some philosophy books with her the next day.
“He said, ‘we will see each other tomorrow morning with the children’. Everything was fine.” In the early hours of the next morning – a month ago today – Sobchenco was found dead in his cell in Cloverhill, aged 37. At about 3am, a garda came to Ludmila’s home and told her Nicolae was in Tallaght hospital. She presumed his headache had got worse. “I got the books, put them in my bag, and thought, ‘now we will read together, we will stay in the hospital, I can touch him without the glass in the prison.’ You know, I was so happy I could see my husband and stay with him in the hospital,” she says, sobbing quietly.
Prison sources believe Sobchenco died by suicide, although separate investigations by the Garda Síochána and the Prison Service have yet to conclude. Ludmila does not believe her husband took his own life.
“I would have felt it. I would have seen if something had changed. He was normal. Why would he ask me to bring the children? Things like that don’t just happen suddenly. He was fine.”
With Sobchenco’s death last month, the Garda file on the case was closed, the answers to so many outstanding questions presumably gone with him to the grave. He was buried after a small Orthodox ceremony, attended by about 30 friends and family, in a funeral home in Clonsilla in early June.
Sobchenco was buried in a simple grave at Confey cemetery, in a quiet plot set in from the country road that leads from Leixlip to Westmanstown. Ludmila had thought of burying him in Moldova, “but my children . . . we will live here,” she says.
“When I go to his grave, it’s so calm and peaceful at that place. I feel him there. It’s like he is near me.”
Some names have been changed