GARDAÍ HAVE begun a murder inquiry after a drug dealer was shot dead last night outside a house in west Dublin. The killing is the fifth gangland murder since the start of the year.
The shooting occurred in the Melrose housing estate in Clondalkin just after 8pm last night.
The victim was sitting in a car outside a house at Melrose Park when a gunman approached the vehicle and fired a number of shots from a handgun.
A second man was in the car at the time but he is not believed to have been injured.
Gardaí are investigating reports that the gunman escaped the scene on either a bicycle or motorbike.
Immediately the shooting occurred the emergency services were contacted. The victim was attended to at the scene before being taken by ambulance to Tallaght Hospital. However, he was pronounced dead a short time later.
Gardaí investigating the murder sealed off the area and a full forensic examination by members of the Garda Technical Bureau was due to begin at first light this morning.
The dead man had not been officially named by the Garda last night.
However, The Irish Timesunderstands he is a 36-year-old from Alpine Heights in Clondalkin, not far from last night's murder scene.
The dead man was a drug user and had been a heroin addict. He was known to gardaí and was believed to have been a member of a drugs gang from Clondalkin that has been very active on the organised crime scene in the west of the city in recent years.
The dead man had been implicated in at least one very significant drug seizure in recent years. In 2003 he was one of five men arrested in Kerry and Limerick when 100kg of cannabis, with an estimated street value of almost €1.3 million, was seized by gardaí.
The drugs were found when gardaí stopped and searched a vehicle in the Limerick village of Adare.
The victim of last night’s shooting told gardaí at that time of the 2003 seizure that he was addicted to heroin and had only agreed to drive the drugs from Dublin to Limerick as settlement of a drugs debt.
Last night’s shooting comes after a relatively quiet fortnight for Dublin gangland crime.
In January an upsurge in mostly drug- related shootings saw 10 men shot, four of them fatally, in a two-week period.
However, despite the violent start to the year, the official crime statistics for 2008 released last week revealed that gun crime decreased last year.
The Garda Commissioner, Fachtna Murphy, said last week that while the trend for gun crime and murders in 2008 was down, there had been a number of high- profile gun killings in the first weeks of this year.
Mr Murphy said gardaí would continue to put in place intelligence-led surveillance operations in an effort to continue the lower gun crime and homicide rates of last year.
Three suspected attempted fatal shootings were thwarted by gardaí in Dublin last month.