Top Kinahan cartel member Sean McGovern has been arrested in Dubai in connection with the 2016 murder of a friend of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch.
UAE cops picked the Kinahan co-leader up following an Interpol Red Notice and a European Arrest Warrant in connection with the fatal shooting of Noel Kirwan. It is not currently known exactly what role McGovern, who was shot in the leg at the Regency Hotel in Dublin in 2016, played in his death.
Kirwan, 62 at the time of his death, was shot eight times in his head, chest and arms as he sat in his car with his partner outside his home in Clondalkin, Dublin, just before Christmas.
He had just come back home from a Christmas lunch with his partner, Bernadette Roe, and her daughter.
He was killed amid a ‘notorious feud’ between the Hutch and Kinahan gangs, two warring criminal factions, despite the fact that he had no criminal connection with either side.
His only criminal connection was a charge for possession of a firearm for intimidation in 1996, but local sources said shortly after his death that he hadn’t been involved in crime for years.
Instead, it is believed he was targeted for his lifelong connection to Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch, who he grew up with.
Kirwan, who also went by the nickname ‘Duck Egg’, was seen with The Monk at the funeral of Eddie Hutch, another gangland member.
Irish cops warned him days after the funeral, which took place earlier in 2016, that his life was in danger.
He had set up an elaborate CCTV system at his west Dublin home, but this wasn’t enough to prevent his murder.
Two days before he was killed, gangland member Jason Keating stuck a tracking device on Kirwan’s car. While he was initially charged with his murder, he took a special type of plea that saw the full murder charge get dropped and replaced with a charge for facilitating a criminal organisation in committing murder.
For this, he was given 10 years in prison in 2018.
Kirwan’s murder is one of 18 deaths linked to the Hutch-Kinahan feud. The most infamous incident of the feud saw McGovern get shot in the leg as six men wearing disguises executed gangster David Byrne at the Regency Hotel in Dublin, before fleeing in a van later found torched.
Wearing helmets and carrying powerful assault rifles with jackets reading ‘Gardai’ on the back, many witnesses said they mistook the men for genuine police before they began killing.
A witness in the hotel at the time of the attack told The Irish Sun one of the killers, dressed as a woman, brushed past him moments prior to the shooting.
He said: I saw a man dressed as a woman. She walked past me but bumped into me. I thought she was a transvestite. Little did I realise it was a man.’
Another witness told the Irish Independent the two gunmen entered the building and began shooting – while another two, including the man dressed as a woman – cornered those fleeing on the steps outside.
The witness explained: ‘I heard a man dressed as a woman say “he’s not f****** here, I can’t find him.” He was wearing a long blonde wig.
‘The other guy roared back “get the f*** out of here” just as the other two came out the front door and came out past me and went down to the silver transit van and they all bundled into this van.’
Police sources told the paper it was clear the gunmen had planned to murder several members of Kinahan’s syndicate, describing it as ‘an unprecedented escalation of a feud that has now become an all-out war’.
Gardai Chief Superintendent Barry O’Brien said it was a ‘particularly nasty incident’ that had involved ‘severe weapons’
A third witness told The Irish Sun: ‘They were wearing masks and helmets. The weapons were massive, like the ones the IRA used to use.’
Ireland’s minister for justice Helen McEntee said that she and the justice department were ‘intensively engaging with the Emirati Minister of Justice, His Excellency Abdullah Bin Sultan Bin Awad Al Nuaimi, about ongoing co-operation’ in criminal justice matters.
She added that while she couldn’t comment on the specific case, Ireland’s government was keen to sign extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties with the UAE.