A 30-year-old man is due to appear in court in Co Kerry this morning after being arrested at the weekend for questioning about the murders of a father and son at their farmhouse outside Moyvane near Listowel last week.
The man was arrested in Tralee at around 7.30pm on Saturday for questioning about the murders of Michael Hanrahan (60) and his son Denis (27), whose bodies were found at their farmhouse bungalow a mile from Moyvane last Thursday morning.
He was taken to Listowel Garda station where he was detained under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act, which allows suspects to be held for an initial period of 48 hours, with the possibility of the detention period being extended to 72 hours.
It is understood the man was arrested by detectives on Saturday night after being discharged from Kerry General Hospital in Tralee, where he had been admitted some time on Thursday evening or Friday morning after going to the hospital with his parents.
Gardaí investigating the killings are awaiting the results of an examination by ballistics experts of a legally held pump-action shotgun recovered by gardaí from a car in the Causeway area of north Kerry late on Saturday night.
The discovery of the shotgun came after tests by ballistics experts on a single-barrel shotgun found on Friday in a cupboard in the Hanrahan home and licensed to Michael Hanrahan concluded that the gun was not the weapon used to kill the two men.
Officers recovered the pump-action shotgun, which is capable of firing multiple cartridges without having to reload, sometime after 10pm on Saturday and the weapon was sent early yesterday morning to Dublin for examination to see if it was the weapon used in the double killing.
Autopsies by Assistant State Pathologist, Dr Margaret Bolster, concluded that both men died from multiple gunshot wounds and gardaí recovered at least eight spent cartridge shells at the scene of the killing, which they believe happened late on Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.
Gardaí believe that Denis Hanrahan was first shot through the door of his bedroom as he lay in bed and was then shot again after he struggled from the bed, leading detectives to believe that the killer was familiar with the layout of the house and the bedroom arrangements.
Gardaí from Kerry had been joined by search teams from Cork and Limerick on Saturday as they combed the fields around the house for the murder weapon.
However, searches planned for yesterday involving the Cork and Limerick teams were cancelled following the discovery of the second gun.
The closely-knit community of Moyvane was yesterday still struggling to come to terms with the enormity and horror of the double killing.
Local parish priest Fr John Lucid lead parishioners in prayer for the Hanrahan family at Mass in the village church.
"We come together to mourn, to grieve over the sad loss of the horrific deaths of Michael and Denis Hanrahan - we can but feel the pain and the futility and we know that it will take time, it will take time but please God, we will work our way through the pain eventually," said Fr Lucid.
