A 40-YEAR-OLD man has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Adil Essalhi in Dublin last year.
Mr Essalhi (31), a father of five, died after suffering a violent assault during which he was struck almost 60 times in the head, neck and arms with a machete-type weapon and a knife.
His burned and bleached body was found partly submerged in a drain a week later by gardaí who had been directed to its location in a cornfield by his killer, Wayne Kinsella.
Kinsella, with an address at The Plaza, Tyrrelstown, but originally from Finglas, had pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Essalhi in the fields behind the Plaza in Tyrrelstown, Blanchardstown, on January 6th, 2011.
The Central Criminal Court jury of seven women and five men took two hours and 38 minutes to reach their unanimous guilty verdict following the two-week trial.
When the judge told Kinsella he was handing down the mandatory penalty of life imprisonment, he replied: “I want to appeal that as well, your honour.”
There was an outburst in court when a friend of the deceased shouted at Kinsella and Kinsella shouted back at him.
The court heard Kinsella has 39 previous convictions, including one for manslaughter for which he received an eight-year sentence.
The jury accepted the prosecution’s case that Kinsella and a relative lured Mr Essalhi to a field and murdered him having “got it into their heads” he was involved in the death of Kinsella’s brother Lee. But speaking outside the court, the victim’s mother, Geraldine Essalhi, denied that her son had anything to do with Lee Kinsella’s death.
Mr Essalhi’s partner, Karen Boylan, and mother of two of his five children, gave birth to their youngest daughter after Mr Essalhi’s death, the court heard.
In the days after Mr Essalhi’s disappearance, Kinsella voluntarily sat into a Garda patrol car and told two detectives he could direct them to where the body of a missing person had been dumped in a field in Tyrrelstown.
The jury heard that Kinsella behaved in an “eccentric” manner and told the detectives that if they were to find the bleached and burned body of the killer of his brother Lee, they could “come looking” for him. Sgt Ann Ellis testified that on the following day she walked “arm in arm” with Kinsella up to a balcony on the Plaza apartment complex in Tyrrelstown after he told her: “Walk with me and I’ll point to where the body is.”
The court heard that gardaí found the body close to where Kinsella had indicated.
The jury also viewed camcorder footage of a handcuffed Kinsella directing gardaí to dig under a group of rocks where he said clothing that had belonged to the deceased was buried. There was DNA evidence that blood on a hoodie dug up by gardaí belonged to Mr Essalhi, while gardaí also uncovered a machete with a wooden handle about 100m from where the body was found.
Counsel for the prosecution Alex Owens SC urged the jury to regard the actions of Kinsella in directing gardaí to the location of the body as the “conduct of a manipulator” trying to “fool the gardaí” that he was an informant in relation to other people involved in the alleged murder, when he was involved himself.