The DPP is still considering whether to direct any prosecutions over a year after receiving “a mammoth Garda file” on the murder of a man who was hacked to death in front of his children almost eight years ago.
Sgt Fergus Twomey told Cork City Coroner’s Court today that the file on the murder of Polish national Mikolaj Wilk in Cork in 2018 was the product of an extensive Garda investigation, and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) was still examining it.
“It has been with the DPP for some time, but it is a mammoth file and the DPP is still perusing it,” said Twomey, who previously revealed the investigation involved up to 1,000 lines of inquiry, including several with an international dimension.
Twomey applied to Cork city coroner Philip Comyn for an adjournment of the inquest to allow the DPP to further consider the file before promising that gardaí would notify the coroner’s office of any developments. Comyn adjourned the matter to November 12th for mention.
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Wilk, a Polish national who worked as a landscape gardener, was attacked by up to five masked men armed with machetes when they burst into his home, the Bridge House at Maglin, near Ballincollig, at about 3am on June 10th, 2018.
Wilk was repeatedly hacked in front of his wife, Elzbieta, who sustained serious slash injuries to her face, neck and hands as she sought to protect her husband. The couple’s two children, who were both under six years of age at the time, were uninjured in the incident.
A woman in her 30s who was renting a room from the Wilks managed to flee through a window at the rear of the house and ran to a nearby house to raise the alarm. Gardaí arrived at the scene where they found Wilk in a critical condition.
Both gardaí and HSE paramedics worked to try to stabilise Wilk’s condition before he was rushed by ambulance to Cork University Hospital, where he died within hours.
The Irish Times has learned the Garda file in the case runs to more than 3,000 pages. It was described by senior Garda sources as “a complex investigation with an international aspect” which involved examining more than 1,000 hours of CCTV footage and detailed analysis of phone records.
The file also includes memos of interviews with six suspects – two Poles and a Latvian, who were arrested at addresses in Ballincollig and Togher in January 2019; a Latvian who was arrested in Blackpool; and an Irish man and woman who were arrested in Mayfield, Cork, in April 2019.
All six were brought to Garda stations around Cork city, where they were detained under Section 50 of the Criminal Justice Act and questioned at length before being released without charge.
The file also includes the results of a postmortem by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margot Bolster, that found Wilk died from shock and haemorrhage due to multiple blows from sharp weapons in association with a traumatic brain injury.
Gardaí appointed a family liaison officer in the case and have been keeping Wilk’s widow informed of developments after she had in June 2018 returned with her children to her home village in Poland, where she and her husband grew up.
