DEPARTMENT OF Foreign Affairs representatives will meet Bolivian officials in the capital La Paz today to underline the Irish Government’s concern at the killing last week of Irishman Mike Dwyer.
Derek Lambe, a second secretary from the Irish Embassy in Argentina, and Ireland’s honorary consul in Bolivia Peter O’Toole will also impress upon Bolivian justice ministry officials the need for the full facts of the case to be established.
Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dick Roche said there was nothing to suggest Mr Dwyer was involved in any criminality.
“My understanding is that Mr Dwyer had absolutely no form of record from any Garda source that would have suggested that he had any misbehaviour, or that he had any record,” Mr Roche said.
The body of Mr Dwyer (24) from near Ballinderry, Co Tipperary, was released by the Bolivians yesterday. It will be flown home for burial later in the week. The Dwyer family have no plans to travel to Bolivia at this time.
The Bolivian authorities have said Mr Dwyer was among a group of foreign mercenaries planning to kill public figures, including President Eva Morales. Two of the other alleged mercenaries were also killed last Thursday with Mr Dwyer while two others were arrested. The police put a cache of weapons on display saying they were owned by the men.
Initial local media reports suggested Mr Dwyer and the other men were shot dead by Bolivian police during a 30-minute gunfight at a hotel in Santa Cruz in the early hours of last Thursday.
Photographs have emerged of Mr Dwyer’s body which show him dressed in his underwear, suggesting that he may have been in bed at the time.
A computer found at the hotel reportedly lists five people who were to be targeted by the alleged mercenaries. However, President Morales’s name was not on the list while that of a senior opposition politician was. This is despite Mr Morales claiming that the men were in Bolivia to kill him and linking the plan to his political opponents.
The Irish officials meeting their Bolivian counterparts today in La Paz will seek evidence that Mr Dwyer was armed and that he engaged the police in a gun battle with the other men, as has been suggested.
The bodies of Mr Dwyer and the other men were wrapped in black plastic bags and taken to a morgue on the back of a pick-up truck. A photograph of one of the bodies shows his hands are tied.
The Bolivian authorities have claimed one of the dead men, Eduardo Rozsa Flores, was the leader of the alleged plot. The Irish Timesunderstands Mr Dwyer was working for Mr Flores as a security guard.
The Irishman graduated from Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology last summer. He had worked as a security guard for a Galway firm while in college and began working for them full-time after graduation. He went to Bolivia on a three-month training course last November.
It appears he met Mr Flores in January and was offered work by him. Mr Dwyer’s family are said to be keen to find out the nature of Mr Flores’s firm’s work and what Mr Dwyer knew about it. A family spokesman said they had many unanswered questions.
Mr Flores was a journalist born in Bolivia with Croatian nationality who had fought in the Balkan wars.
Zoltan Brady, editor of a magazine for which Mr Flores wrote in Hungary, said he had gone to Bolivia last spring “to fight against its communist government” and for the independence of the province of Santa Cruz. He dismissed suggestions Mr Flores was a hired assassin.