Gilligan team to see letters to protected witnesses

Barristers representing murder suspect Mr John Gilligan are to receive copies of Department of Justice correspondence with two…

Barristers representing murder suspect Mr John Gilligan are to receive copies of Department of Justice correspondence with two protected witnesses.

Prosecutors at the Veronica Guerin murder trial yesterday agreed to hand over the documents on the witnesses, Russell Warren and Charles Bowden, but warned certain names on the files would be blacked out.

Prosecution counsel Mr Peter Charleton said the State would claim legal privilege if Mr Gilligan's barristers tried to discover the blacked-out names.

The files relate to correspondence between the Department of Justice and two witnesses after December 1st last year. Both men are under the Witness Protection Programme and gave evidence against Mr Gilligan at the trial.

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Barristers disagreed on whether Mr Gilligan's legal team should also receive correspondence between the two men and gardai attached to the Witness Protection Programme.

The court also heard gardai seized a home video of Mr Gilligan on a foreign holiday with alleged criminal associates. Det Garda Bernard Masterson told Mr Charleton that gardai seized the video at an electronics shop in Dublin city centre.

The video included scenes of Mr Gilligan in St Lucia in the Caribbean with Brian Meehan, Kevin Meehan (Brian's father), Paul Ward and another man who cannot be named.

A garda attached to the Criminal Assets Bureau said he had travelled to Austria twice and had discovered Brian and Kevin Meehan had transferred £600,000 from Irish bank accounts to accounts held in Vienna. Some of the money was first routed through the Isle of Man before reaching Vienna.

The garda, who cannot be named, said the CAB had since seized the money in the accounts. The trial continues.