Ireland deploys armed task force in gang war

DUBLIN — Ireland’s police force deployed military-style road checkpoints Tuesday as the government announced toughened measures to try to prevent a gang war in Dublin from claiming more lives.

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said a 55-member armed police unit would be created for Dublin in hopes of suppressing what she called an “evil and sinister cycle of gangland violence.”

The move is significant in a country where police typically patrol unarmed. It was announced at an emergency meeting with police chiefs following Monday night’s killing of a brother of Gerry “The Monk” Hutch, a gang chieftain credited with directing many of Ireland’s most famous bank heists.

Taxi driver Eddie Hutch, 59, was shot several times in the hallway of his home. He was targeted in apparent retaliation for Friday’s gun attack on a boxing weigh-in being attended by senior figures from a rival gang led by Irish fugitive Christy Kinahan.

In Friday’s attack, five gunmen allegedly from the Hutch camp targeted Kinahan loyalists arriving at the hotel for the boxing event. The gunmen, including three armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and disguised as an elite police unit and one man dressed as a woman, shot three men, killing one, in front of scores of civilians including young children.

The violence focuses on the international drug trafficking business of Kinahan, a Dubliner who after prison sentences in Ireland and the Netherlands runs his empire from a villa in Spain’s Costa del Sol.