The mobile phones: Gardai investigating the murder of Robert Holohan will look closely at mobile phone patterns of suspects in an attempt to see if any of their movements matched those of the 11-year-old schoolboy.
According to an informed source, officers will be working closely with the mobile phone companies in the coming days to see if they can trace any phone activity by suspects in areas where Robert was known to have been.
Mobile phone companies can use a technique known as pinging to establish whether known mobile phones were used to make connections with individual masts and thus establish whether the phone was used in a particular area.
According to the source, if gardaí come to the mobile phone company with particular phone numbers, the company can establish if they were used in specific locations.
Gardaí are likely to check the telephone usage of a number of known and suspected sex offenders whose phone numbers they have obtained to see if any of them were in the areas where Robert was last seen and where his body was found.
The technology has already been used in the joint Garda/PSNI investigation into the Omagh bombing to locate a number of suspects along the route that the bomb travelled before it was detonated.
"In this case, the technology will allow gardaí to check on the movements of a suspect through their mobile phone usage and, if that doesn't tally with his statement of where he was to gardaí, then obviously he will be interviewed again," the source said.
Gardaí will be anxious to see if there is any match between the phone usage by a suspect and Robert's last known movements near his home at Ballyedmond on the afternoon of January 4th and the discovery of his body near Inch strand 12 miles away.
"If somebody was found to have been making a mobile call in the Ballyedmond area on Tuesday afternoon," the source said, "and was later found to have made a call in Inch, say on Tuesday night or Wednesday, then they would become a serious suspect."
