Torture of Kevin Lunney: A vicious crime that shocked the nation

A criminal gang had been watching Kevin Lunney for weeks before two men reversed a stolen silver BMW into his Toyota Land Cruiser on the narrow country lane leading to his home in Derrylin on September 17th, 2019.

Recruited to participate in the abduction, the two men in the BMW had no direct part in the feud that had impacted the lives of Mr Lunney and his fellow directors at Quinn Industrial Holdings, a part of the fragmented legacy of Sean Quinn’s business empire. Neither did the man who emerged from the other end of the laneway holding a Stanley knife, which he held to Mr Lunney’s face as he threatened him and told him to get into the boot of his Audi A4.

During the near two-and-a-half hour ordeal that followed, Mr Lunney was threatened repeatedly with the Stanley knife, struck with a bat and brought to a horse trailer where he had his shin shattered with a plank of wood, his face slashed on both sides and the letters QIH carved into his chest with the blade of the knife.

Describing the pain following the first blow of the bat that broke his shin in the Special Criminal Court, Mr Lunney said: “It was extremely sore, very very difficult, I think I shouted or roared or yelled, or something and it was extremely painful and then the same individual said to the other individual, did that snap? And I shouted, ‘yes it did,’ and he said, ‘no’, and then immediately he hit again.” The second blow landed in exactly the same spot, causing him to scream in pain.

To destroy forensic evidence, his attackers stripped him to his boxers and doused him in bleach, rubbing it into his face and into the scratches and cuts he had endured. After telling him to resign from QIH and to put a stop to litigation he was involved with in Belfast and Dublin, they dumped him on a rural roadside with a warning not to turn around in order to try to identify his torturers or they would kill him.

“I was exhausted,” he said as he later recounted his attempt to drag himself towards a window showing a light on in the distance.

“I could sense the blood running down my chest and I was conscious my face was bleeding. My left arm and left leg were all I could use to push myself along but I decided to push myself towards that window and kept doing that for, I don’t know, a number of minutes. I stopped a couple of times, exhausted, getting very fearful that I wouldn’t get there and nobody would come,” he told the court.

It was 8.45pm when tractor driver Aaron Brady discovered Mr Lunney by the side of the road near Cloggy Cross in Drumcoghill, Co Cavan. He had been abducted at about 6.30pm.

He would continue to suffer in the weeks and months ahead, from the effects of the fractured shin, the scars on his face which he hides with a beard, and the fear of going outside that he described to a doctor one month later.

Earlier this month the Special Criminal Court found three of the men guilty of abducting and intentionally causing him serious harm. The fourth man was acquitted.

Alan O’Brien (40) and Darren Redmond (27) of Shelmalier Road and Caledon Road respectively, both in East Wall in Dublin along with Luke O’Reilly (68) from Kilcogy, Co Cavan and a 40-year-old man, who may only be identified as YZ, had all denied charges of falsely imprisoning and intentionally causing serious harm to the 51-year-old businessman.

The court convicted O’Brien, Redmond and YZ of false imprisonment and intentionally causing serious harm to Mr Lunney. Mr O’Reilly was acquitted. He wept as the verdict in his case was read out in court.

Defence counsel for the four accused did not cross examine Mr Lunney at length or try to undermine his story. His injuries, documented by doctors at Cavan General Hospital, were proof of the ordeal he had suffered.

He could not identify any of his attackers other than to say they were from Dublin and the one who inflicted most of the injuries was larger and seemed older than the others. They hid their faces with masks and for much of the abduction Mr Lunney had material wrapped around his head to prevent him from seeing.

But Mr Lunney’s keen memory and clear description gave investigating gardaí vital clues. He told them that as he lay in the boot he was occasionally able to see through the pulled down back seat and out the window. He remembered a Lakeland Dairies sign and a pub with a cream-coloured sign, about one metre in length running down the side of the building.

When he was taken from the boot, after a drive lasting 40 to 50 minutes, he could tell he was in a yard overgrown with weeds and with a number of trailers. The one he was taken to was a blue horse box with animal dung on the floor, and beside it, he said, was a white trailer. The Lakeland Dairies and pub signs helped gardaí identify the route taken by the Audi.

The key to the investigation, though, was Mr Lunney’s revelation that midway through the attack his assailants decided they needed bleach to destroy forensic evidence. Two of the three men in the trailer left and about 15 minutes later returned with a bottle of bleach.

Gardaí canvassed shops in the area and discovered that Luke O’Reilly, identified from CCTV footage, bought a bottle of Domestos at Lynch’s Gala in Killydoon at about 8pm while Mr Lunney was being held in the horse trailer.

When Mr O’Reilly handed over his phone to gardaí, they discovered that he had been in contact with Cyril McGuinness just minutes before buying the bottle of bleach.

McGuinness was a well-known criminal who is now deceased. He was nominated by the prosecution as the organiser of the attack on Mr Lunney. The Garda investigation showed that he was in constant contact with YZ throughout the preparation for and execution of the offences against Mr Lunney.

He was also responsible for importing the Renault Kangoo used by the gang to get to and from Cavan and was present when the Audi used in the abduction was bought from another man on DoneDeal.

Three days after the abduction, a garda discovered a yard in Drumbrade, Ballinagh, Co Cavan, that seemed identical to the one described by Mr Lunney. It soon emerged that the yard belonged to Luke O’Reilly. Forensic testing revealed that blood DNA inside a blue horsebox in the yard matched that of Mr Lunney.

When gardaí examined the mobile phones of all the accused, they discovered that after buying the bleach in Killydoon, Mr O’Reilly drove north, away from his home at Kilcogy towards Drumbrade, where Mr Lunney was being held in a yard that he owned. At the same time, YZ’s phone was connecting to masts running along the N55 heading south towards Mr O’Reilly.

The court acquitted Mr O’Reilly of all charges against him because, as was argued by defence counsel Michael Lynn SC, it was not proven that he knew what was to happen to Mr Lunney. Mr Justice Tony Hunt said that what happened at the yard owned by Mr O’Reilly must have occurred with “some degree of consent and knowledge” on his part.

The court, however, said that Mr O’Reilly was not charged with assisting a criminal organisation or criminal activity in a general sense, but as a principal offender for false imprisonment and intentionally causing harm to Mr Lunney. Mr Justice Hunt said: “Accordingly, the prosecution must establish that it is an inexorable inference that Mr O’Reilly knew or intended that his actions and assistance would be directed towards these specific offences.”

The circumstantial cases against the three men who were convicted relied largely on mobile phone and CCTV evidence. Many days of the trial were taken up by legal argument over the legality of gardaí accessing mobile phone data and using CCTV harvested from shops, pubs and other private operators.

Gardaí were aware in 2019 of the legal difficulties around using mobile phone evidence and so accessed phone records using ordinary warrants rather than the Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011. The court in this trial rejected the defence arguments and ruled that gardaí had acted properly in using warrants to access information that was to be used in the investigation of serious crime.

‘Mass surveillance’

The court also rejected the defence’s arguments that the use of CCTV amounts to mass surveillance and should be forbidden.

In the case of YZ, the court listed 17 strands of circumstantial evidence which Mr Justice Hunt said were “sufficient to support beyond reasonable doubt the conclusion that YZ was heavily involved in these crimes before, during and after the commission thereof”.

The evidence included him being seen on CCTV driving a Renault Kangoo van on the day of the abduction and Mr Lunney’s DNA being found subsequently in the van in an area of suspected blood staining.

The court concluded that the van was “used as a means of transport by those involved in the preparation for and execution of these crimes.” YZ was also connected to the Audi used to kidnap Mr Lunney when gardaí found an eFlow tag in YZ’s home that belonged to the Audi’s previous owner.

Gardaí never found the Audi but were able to identify it from CCTV as it travelled from Derrylin to Drumbrade. The BMW that was used to smash into Mr Lunney’s car at Derrylin was burned out in the laneway.

Gardaí spotted the Kangoo on a Dublin Street about one month after the abduction and members of the NSU watched it for a time. When Alan O’Brien drove it to a yard just outside Drogheda, gardaí feared it was going to be destroyed and seized it for forensic examination.

The Court used Mr Lunney’s’s descriptions and a comparison of the appearances of the three assailants on CCTV, to find that YZ was the one who inflicted most of Mr Lunney’s’s injuries.

While YZ repeatedly told Mr Lunney to resign from Quinn Industrial Holdings, the prosecution accepted from the outset that none of the accused had anything to do with QIH.

In opening the trial, prosecution counsel Sean Guerin SC said there was no personal motive involved.

As the offender who inflicted most of Mr Lunney’s injuries, YZ received the longest prison sentence of the three with the court jailing him for 30 years.

Mr Justice Hunt said, however, that all three accused had participated in an enterprise that was “carefully and meticulously planned” by a serious criminal organisation.

O’Brien and Redmond (27) were jailed for 25 and 18 years respectively. The 18-year sentence had the last three suspended.