LONDON (AA) – Two men were shot dead in Dublin Monday night in the latest killings thought to be driven by a longstanding gang feud, local Irish media reported Tuesday.
The victims, both aged in their 30s, were killed in separate gun attacks three hours apart in separate districts of the Irish capital.
The Irish Independent said the first man, named as Michael Barr, was shot three times by a lone gunman in the Sunset House pub, close to the center of the city.
Barr was a dissident republican who may have been supplying weapons to a local mob, the newspaper reported.
The second man died three hours later during an attack in a house in Clondalkin, a suburb to the west of Dublin. It was not known whether the two incidents were connected.
Police fear the shootings could be connected to a feud between rival Dublin gangs that has escalated since last September, when suspected gang member Gary Hutch was killed in an attack in Spain.
That attack promoted masked men to storm a boxing weigh-in at a Dublin hotel in February, killing alleged gangster David Byrne. Another member of the Hutch family was shot dead just three days later, apparently in a retaliatory attack.
Claims that the successive shootings are the result of tensions between rival elements connected to the IRA have previously been dismissed by Sinn Fein, the political party that is historically associated with the militant group.
The party wants to abolish the country’s juryless Special Criminal Court, established to deal with terrorism and serious organized crime.
