The Special Criminal Court is expected to give its verdict next week in the trial of Mr John Gilligan, who is accused of the murder of Veronica Guerin.
Defence submissions in the trial concluded today and Mr Justice Diarmuid O’Donovan, presiding, said the court will have to take some time to consider every aspect of the case and it hoped to be able to give its verdict in the case next Thursday.
The judge said that it was possible the court will not have reached a conclusion by then. The court remanded Mr Gilligan in custody until then. Mr Gilligan said: "Thank you very much'' before being led from the dock.
Prosecuting counsel Mr Eamonn Leahy SC in his closing submission told the court it was not the prosecution's contention that Mr Gilligan was present at the Naas Road when Ms Guerin was shot dead by the pillion passenger on a motorbike. The court has heard Mr Gilligan left Dublin airport for Amsterdam the day before the murder.
But Mr Leahy said it was the prosecution's contention that Mr Gilligan played a leading part in a pre-arranged plan to shoot Ms Guerin and was therefore complicit in the murder and guilty in law.
The prosecution claimed that Mr Gilligan was the leader of a gang that imported hundreds of kilos of cannabis into the country and that Ms Guerin was shot because an assault case she was taking against Mr Gilligan threatened to disrupt the drugs business.
Other members of the gang included Charles Bowden, Brian Meehan, Paul Ward and two other men who cannot be named by order of the court.
During the 43 day trial the court heard evidence from almost 200 witnesses, including three men currently in the Witness Protection Programme, John Dunne, Charles Bowden and Russell Warren. All three are currently serving prison sentences in Arbour Hill prison.
John Dunne gave evidence that he was introduced to Mr Gilligan in a Co Dublin pub and that Mr Gilligan arranged for packages to be shipped to Ireland from Holland through the freight company in Cork where Dunne was the operations manager.
Charles Bowden told the court that he met Mr Gilligan on three occasions and that he spoke to him by mobile phone. He said he met Mr Gilligan outside the Gresham Hotel where he handed over money to him, that he met him briefly at the Ambassador Hotel in Co Kildare when he was making a drugs collection and that he met him after the Guerin murder at his brother, Mr Thomas Gilligan's house.
Bowden also said he cleaned and loaded the Magnum .357 revolver used in the Guerin murder the day before the killing and left it in the lock up premises at the Greenmount Industrial Estate in Harolds's Cross used by the drugs gang.
Russell Warren said that he collected and counted money for Mr Gilligan from early 1996 and delivered money to England, Belgium and Amsterdam. He said he never travelled with less than £100,000 and usually changed the money at a bureau de change at Amsterdam's Central Station.
He told the court that Mr Gilligan told him to go to Naas and follow Veronica Guerin who was in her red Opel Calibra car when it left Naas courthouse on the day she was murdered.
Warren said that he spoke to Mr Gilligan minutes after witnessing the murder. He said: "I told him they were after shooting somebody. He said: Are they gone, did they get away?
"He said are they dead and I said they shot somebody five times. I said I was just behind the car. He said the same thing will happen to you and to your mate if you do anything about it."
During four days of defence submissions Mr Gilligan's counsel Mr Michael O'Higgins SC said that it would be unsafe to convict Mr Gilligan because the evidence of Warren and Bowden was "inherently unreliable". Mr O'Higgins also said that the relationship between the State and the witnesses threatened to jeopardise the whole criminal justice system.