Evil gang menace must be eradicated

The murder of Warren Crossan in west Belfast on Saturday was, by any definition, a brutal killing, as the details show. Two masked gunmen chased Crossan, aged 26, through the streets near his mother’s home in the St James’ area of the city. One of the attackers chillingly ignored his pleas for mercy and shot him at least five times.

Crossan’s father Tommy, a leader in the Continuity IRA, was himself murdered by rival dissident republicans in 2014, following a fall-out over money. The young Warren Crossan was suspected of providing the getaway car which was used in the killing of the Dublin hitman Robbie Lawlor, who was shot dead in Ardoyne in April.

It will surprise no-one that paramilitary groups of all hues are deeply involved in all kinds of criminality including drug-dealing.

However a sinister new development as represented by the Robbie Lawlor and Warren Crossan murders is the extent to which Dublin’s well-established gangland feuding is now being played out north of the border.

At a PSNI press conference yesterday, Detective Chief Inspector Darren Mccartney declined to be drawn on a southern connection to the murder but detectives have not ruled out a link with organised crime there.

Lawlor was the prime suspect in the murder and mutilation of the Donegal teenager Keane Mulready-woods, whose dismembered body parts were found in various places near Dublin earlier this year.

It is shocking, even for a city like Belfast so well-used to violence, that contract killers, acting on the orders of gangland figures in the south, can shoot dead a man in Ardoyne up here, in broad daylight and in full view of eye-witnesses.

As the murder of Detective Garda Colm Horkan in Co Roscommon earlier this month has shown, violent deaths are not restricted to just one jurisdiction on this island.

This makes it all the more imperative that the PSNI and An Garda Siochana must respond to this latest killing with the proper joined-up and transnational approach for which they are justly recognised.

In the PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne and the Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, whose own RUC Superintendent father Alwyn was murdered on duty, we have two police chiefs who have the ability and experience to eradicate this evil menace once and for all.