[ad_1]
The former leader of a drug gang John Gilligan has been arrested in the Alicante area of Spain, where he moved after the attempts on his life in Ireland.
Garda sources said they were aware of Gilligan’s arrest but are still trying to establish why he was detained by Spanish police on the Costa Blanca.
The Irish Times understands that Dubliner Gilligan (68) was arrested with two other men.
One of those men is Irish and Gilligan has known him for decades.
The identity of the third man arrested was unclear.
Gilligan has ties to Spain, where he spent time running his drug empire and at one point owned a pub, the Chamber of Judges near Alicante, with associates.
Gardaí was making inquiries with authorities in southern Spain on Thursday in an attempt to establish the circumstances of his arrest.
Members of her drug gang shot and killed Veronica Guerin in 1996.
Gilligan was found not guilty of that murder, although he was jailed on drug trafficking charges.
He was released from Portlaoise prison in October 2013, after his 17th birthday. Most of that time he served a sentence for drug trafficking, with a brief additional period for threatening to kill a prison official.
In early December 2013, when Gilligan had been free for six weeks; two armed men entered the Halfway House pub in Ashtown, north of Dublin.
Gardaí believes they were looking for him.
Gilligan was less than 1 km away at the Hole in the Wall Pub at the time.
Gardaí formally warned him that his life was in danger. For a time he was driven by a caretaker in a bulletproof car.
A couple of months later, in late February 2014, Gilligan was again attacked. This time he was shot and wounded at his brother’s house in Clondalkin. Photos surfaced of him in a wheelchair after the attack and he fled to the UK for a time.
Exactly two weeks after the attack that nearly killed Gilligan, Stephen ‘Dougie’ Moran, who had been driving him through Dublin, was shot dead at his home in Lucan on the night of March 15.
[ad_2]