Another innocent caught in the crossfire

Gardaí in Dublin are investigating a double murder which occurred in Finglas before 10:00am on Tuesday. Responding to an emergency call, officers entered a house at Scribblestown Park and discovered the bodies of two males. Both had been shot. The victims were later named as leading drug dealer Martin "Marlo" Hyland (39) and Anthony Campbell (20) who, as has been said repeatedly, "was in the wrong place at the wrong time".
Mr Campbell, the eldest of four children, lived with his parents at St Michan's Flats in Dublin's north inner city. He was an apprentice plumber who had been dropped at the house at around 9:00am while his employer went off to collect some materials. When the man returned to the house, shortly before 10:00am, he discovered his apprentice dead on the ground floor and Mr Hyland, who had been asleep in an upstairs bedroom, had been shot six times. It appears that those who wanted the drug dealer dead thought nothing of killing the young apprentice to make sure he would never act as a witness.
Martin Hyland had been at the centre of a major garda operation aimed at tackling serious crime in north Dublin. Over the past few months Operation Oak had proved to be particularly successful, with the seizure of drugs valued at €23m, the recovery of a number of firearms and the arrest of 30 people, including Hyland's second in command. At least 24 of those arrested have been charged in the courts but 23 are currently out on bail.
Hyland has been described as possibly the country's biggest drug dealer. Five days before he died he was warned by gardaí that some of his many enemies were planning to kill him. For that reason he was staying at different addresses and, for the previous few nights, he had slept in his niece's house at Scribblestown Park where his enemies caught up with him. The niece had been taking her five-year-old son to school at the time of the shooting.
There is a widespread theory that Hyland was killed as a result of the recent garda success in arresting his accomplices and intercepting his drug shipments. It is thought that some of his erstwhile associates considered him a liability and decided to kill him.
Once Hyland was dead journalists had much to say about him, none of it in any way complimentary. I had never heard of him, apparently because those journalists who knew his history had all been threatened with libel suits if they published anything untoward about him. According to Sunday World crime correspondent Paul Williams, Hyland was a violent and ruthless man who carried out a number of murders and organised others, "five or six in the past year". He accused him of being the person who arranged the murder of Latvian mother-of-two Baiba Saulite. He went further and claimed that the first two people sent to carry out the killing came across Ms Saulite with her two children and couldn't bring themselves to shoot her. Hyland, it is claimed, then gave the job to others who would have no such qualms.
Mr Williams was being interviewed on Joe Duffy's Liveline programme on RTÉ Radio 1. He used the occasion to attack the legal profession, saying that Hyland and others like him have access to the country's best lawyers who are totally unconcerned about the consequences of ensuring their clients remain free to continue with their murderous activities. He went on to claim that a Sunday World undercover team had been monitoring Hyland and had twice seen him in the company of Dessie O'Hare in recent weeks; the two, he said, met in a hotel in Swords one week before Baiba Saulite was murdered. If true this could have serious consequences for the former INLA man who was considered one of the most vicious paramilitaries at the time of his arrest in 1987. He served 18 years of a 40-year sentence and one of the conditions of his extended temporary release is that he does not associate with criminals.