Farah Swaleh Noor met his death after an alcohol and ecstasy-fuelled day and night with his girlfriend Kathleen Mulhall, who had asked her two daughters to meet her on the Sunday of St Patrick's weekend.
The four of them were spotted on Dublin's O'Connell Street drinking vodka and coke, and the three women took ecstasy on the Liffey Boardwalk, before heading back to Kathleen Mulhall's flat in the north inner city.
The daughters said their mother and Mr Noor began rowing on the way back. At the flat, both sisters said their mother crumbled up an E tablet and put it into Mr Noor's drink so he would be on the same "buzz" as they were. He had said he didn't want to take any.
Linda Mulhall said she was sitting on her sister Charlotte's lap, when Mr Noor came in and put his arm around her waist.
"He pulled me close to him and said something into my ear I did not understand but I know it was dirty, dirty." She said he said something about them being "creatures of the night" and she asked her mother what he meant. He was still holding her tightly. Her mother asked: "What the f*** are you doing?"
Linda Mulhall said: "Farah kept saying: 'you're so like your mammy'." She said there was a Stanley blade on the counter and Charlotte Mulhall, who was telling Mr Noor to get his hands off her, picked up the blade and cut his throat. She said he staggered through the bedroom door and hit his head on a bunk bed.
"I picked up a hammer and hit him on the head loads of times, a good few times, and Charlotte stabbed him," she told gardaí.
Before the murder, Kathleen Mulhall told Charlotte about threats Mr Noor had made to her: "She just told me he kept saying to her 'I'm going to kill you before the year is up'."
Everyone was arguing and she said: "Ma kept saying to me and Linda, 'please just kill him for me'; then she got the hammer and the knife and she gave them to me and Linda, but he wouldn't let Linda go and I cut him on the neck."
Det Sgt Gerard McDonnell said Charlotte Mulhall had told him: "It was just a blade or a knife, I don't remember." She said Linda was hitting him with a hammer. Asked who stabbed him, she said: "I don't remember everything that happened", but she said she remembered stabbing him in the neck and having a knife.
Gardaí say Kathleen Mulhall is out of the jurisdiction but they are "actively seeking her" for questioning. The three women had travelled to Manchester before being arrested and questioned about the murder in August last year. Their father John, who was estranged from his wife, was also questioned in August. He died before Christmas last year.
When the body was first pulled from the canal, it was not clear that the victim was black. Once this was established, advertisements were placed in newspapers read by the African community.
Mr Noor's friend Mohammed Ali Abu Bakaar saw a picture of the soccer jersey which had been pulled from the canal. He remembered seeing his friend wearing it on the day of the killing and had seen him on O'Connell Street with a woman he knew as "Katherine" and her two daughters.