BACKGROUND:Seized weapons could have caused mayhem had they been used by the criminal gang, writes CONOR LALLY, Crime Correspondent
ROCKET LAUNCHERS seized during the latest Garda operation against an organised crime gang would be capable of piercing a military armoured vehicle before exploding inside.
Garda sources said the weapons could be fired with accuracy from “a few hundred metres”, and would have the same impact as firing a grenade directly at a target.
The weapons are made up of a launcher and rocket. Once fired, the launcher cannot be used again.
The weapons are fired from an over-the-shoulder launch position and would cause significant damage to a building or vehicle.
Garda sources said the Dublin drug gang may have planned to fire a rocket into a vehicle, pub, or other premises to kill several members of a rival gang in a single attack.
The gang may also have intended to blow up the cab of a cash-in-transit van to overcome new security protocols and get at money in the back.
In 2007, gardaí and the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency established a sting operation against Limerick’s McCarthy-Dundon gang after receiving intelligence that the gang was trying to source rocket launchers from a London gang.
A staged delivery of old IRA weapons was arranged in a hotel car park in Co Cork, and two men were arrested and later convicted.
Their trial heard the rockets were to be used to blow up a prison van carrying a prisoner to give evidence against gang members.
In another case, a mock rocket launcher was used by a dissident republican gang in 1998 during a botched robbery of a Securicor van in Co Wicklow.
One gang member pointed the fake weapon at the van’s crew to coerce them into getting out of the vehicle.
However, gardaí were waiting and moved in, shooting one of the raiders dead.
The rockets seized yesterday at a storage facility in Straffan, Co Kildare, originated in eastern Europe or Russia. Identical weapons were used by the Russian army from the early 1980s to mid-1990s.
Defence Forces personnel who work to render weapons safe regularly encounter such materiel on UN missions.
They are designed to pierce small military armoured vehicles and to explode only when the exterior of the target vehicle, or premises, has been breached by the rocket head.
The two seized launchers are owned by a known gangland criminal from southwest Dublin.
He is a key ally of another criminal who leads one of two gangs in the longstanding Crumlin-Drimnagh drugs feud. That dispute began almost a decade ago and has cost at least 13 lives.
The man believed to own the rockets, AK47 and €700,000 worth of cocaine seized yesterday is not among the four men being questioned about the haul. He lives mostly in Spain.