The murder of a north Dublin drug-dealer is believed to have been carried out by rival criminals who appear to have been emulating the murders of three young Irishmen in the Netherlands last month.
Mr Derek Benson (33) died from wounds inflicted with a machete or hatchet after he was attacked in his flat at Sandyhill Avenue, Ballymun, on Saturday.
His attackers, believed to be members of a gang which supplies heroin in the area, set fire to the flat before leaving. Firemen found Mr Benson in the flat after neighbours had raised the alarm. He was still alive but died on his way to hospital.
Post-mortem results showed that Mr Benson, who had a criminal record for burglary, died as a result of an assault with at least one weapon.
A neighbour called gardai after hearing shouting and screaming and smoke coming from the flat which Mr Benson shared with his girlfriend and her child. It is believed the woman had left the flat.
Mr Benson, it seems, tried to fight off his attackers, and there appears to have been a considerable amount of violence. Neighbours spoke of bloody footprints in the stairwell outside the flat.
Gardai were unsure yesterday if the setting of fires in the apartment was an attempt to destroy forensic evidence or if it was an act of premeditated violence aimed at sending out a threatening message to rival criminals.
The bodies of the three young Irishmen murdered in Scheveningen, in the Netherlands, were doused in petrol and set on fire after they were tortured and shot. The publicity surrounding the Dutch killings may have prompted Mr Benson's killers to set fire to his flat, according to gardai.
According to police sources in the Netherlands there is a growing tendency among criminals involved in drugs to use torture and mutilation in murders in order to intimidate rivals.
It is not unknown for Dublin criminals to torture victims before murdering them. One north Dublin criminal, P.J. Judge, is known to have tortured and murdered at least one man. Judge was himself shot dead by the IRA three years ago.
The murder of Mr Benson brings the number of unsolved gangland murders in Dublin during the past 20 months to 18. Most of these were as a result of inter-gang rivalry, but at least two are believed to have been carried out by the IRA.
The IRA shot dead a Finglas drug-dealer, Joseph Foran, in February, and an IRA man from north inner Dublin is the prime suspect in the murder of Thomas Byrne, who was shot dead outside O'Neill's pub in Summerhill two weeks ago.
The other republican terrorist group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), was responsible for shooting dead Patrick Neville at Inchicore on the day before Mr Byrne was assassinated.