With the shooting in a Dublin hotel of gangster David Byrne, the bloody rivalry between Ireland’s most notorious drug bosses erupted into the lives of ordinary people, leaving police and politicians equally dismayed

Wearing nothing more than a pair of royal blue Superman Y-fronts, Irish boxing contender Jamie Kavanagh was flexing his muscles for the cameras on stage in preparation for the weigh-in when automatic gunfire echoed around the main hall of Dublin’s Regency Hotel.

Dozens of people attending Friday’s pre-bout ritual for yesterday’s subsequently aborted WBO fight for the European lightweight title fled for their lives. Young boys were caught on a live television feed screaming for their fathers as the shots rang out. As the camera that had been trained on the fighters moved around the room a panic broke out, and the audio captured the sound of a child calling: “Daddy, Daddy help me! What happened, Daddy?”

Three gunmen, at least two of whom were carrying AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, had gatecrashed the event. Their target was 32-year-old David Byrne, a known “soldier” of a Costa del Sol-based Dublin gangster. They killed Byrne and wounded several others.

At around 2pm, the killers had gained entry to the hotel by brazenly pretending to be members of the Garda’s elite armed police squad. They wore yellow hi-vis bibs printed with the letters ERU, for Emergency Response Unit.

Their murderous actions will make the genuine ERU, and indeed the entire Irish police force, extremely busy over the coming weeks and months, as two of the most ruthless criminal gangs in Europe square up to each other.

Later on Friday night, sharply defined pictures, captured by CCTV cameras trained on the hotel entrance, were released of gunmen in masks, army style-helmets and flak jackets just before they went in for the kill. The images underlined that this had been a military-like assault on their enemies. It also emerged yesterday that as many as six people had been involved in the attack, including one man who had gained entry to the weigh-in by posing as a woman, in a dress and a blond wig.

Security sources in Dublin said yesterday that the gang had intended to kill others in addition to Byrne in their rampage through a hotel packed not only with boxing fans but with supporters of the Welsh rugby team, in town for Sunday’s Six Nations clash with Ireland at the Aviva Stadium.

One gunman, armed with an AK-47, is said to have told sports reporters covering the event on Friday to “get the fuck out of the way” as he went in search of their quarry.

Another witness said they had seen Byrne slumped over the foyer reception desk after he had been shot.

Byrne’s suspected killer is a hitman well-known to Garda, who is loyal to career criminal Gerry Hutch. Hutch, known as the Monk, is suspected of being behind the murder of another rival criminal, Eamon “the Don” Dunne, who was shot dead in a pub in Cabra, north Dublin, almost six years ago.

Byrne, too, had form in the criminal underworld and had been arrested in 2008 in connection with the attempted murder of a 20-year-old man in Ballyfermot, west Dublin.

The boxing match, which was to have taken place at the National Stadium in west Dublin, was billed as a “Clash of the Clans” – an apposite title given the clan-like warfare that has re-erupted in the city.

In one corner of this bloodstained contest stands the man thought to be behind Friday’s attack, who was first named by the murdered investigative journalist Veronica Guerin as the Monk. Garda sources suspect the man who controls most of the drug dealing in Dublin’s Northside acted for revenge and self-preservation.

In the other corner is a figure from the Southside of the Irish capital who now lives in southern Spain, and who is believed to have ordered the assassination of the Monk’s nephew, Gary Hutch, in an Andalucian apartment complex last September. This gangland boss has been trying to muscle in on his rival’s Northside turf over for the past 18 months.

And in the middle are legions of the two men’s followers who have killed and have been killed in this, one of the longest-running feuds in Dublin’s vicious gangland war.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A police cordon sealing off the Regency hotel. Photograph: Caroline Quinn/AFP/Getty Images

Among the casualties of the struggle to control Ireland’s heroin, cocaine and synthetic drug business was the father of the young boxer who was weighing in on Friday afternoon for his fight with João Bento from Portugal for the vacant WBO European Lightweight title. Jamie Kavanagh’s father, Gerard, (also known as Hatchet) was shot dead two years ago in Spain.

Gerard Kavanagh was a known money collector for the Spanish-based Irish drug lord Christy Kinahan and, according to Garda sources, was on one occasion sent back to Ireland by his boss to collect a €1m debt from lower-level drug dealers in Dublin. When “Hatchet” Kavanagh failed to claw back the cash for Kinahan in 2014, the gangster’s bag man was shot dead.

But until Friday’s killing in the Regency Hotel, the most significant murder in this turf war had been that of 34-year-old Gary Hutch. The gangster was gunned down beside the swimming pool at an apartment complex in Angel de Miraflores near Marbella on the Costa del Sol in September last year. A convicted armed robber and drug dealer, Hutch had apparently been singled out to be killed after falling out with Kinahan and his cohorts over a major drug-dealing operation which also involved a South American crime gang. His uncle back in Dublin vowed to take revenge and refused all offers of mediation or “sit down” talks over the past six months with Kinahan’s representatives.

One senior Garda officer has described Friday’s shootings as “an unprecedented escalation of a feud that has now become an all-out war”.

Campaigning in Dublin yesterday morning in the Irish general election, the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, said he had asked Ireland’s justice minister, Frances Fitzgerald, to keep him updated about the gangland warfare.

In response to the hotel shooting and fearing further attacks, Kenny said his party would, if it was returned to office, establish a second special criminal court to clear a backlog of cases and to guard against witness intimidation.

Meanwhile, senior Irish security sources say there was much more at stake than simply a crime lord exacting revenge for his nephew’s murder. They believe the Monk has now allied himself with a gang in Spain whose origins are in Scotland, who were planning to overthrow Kinahan’s drug-dealing operation on the Costa del Sol.

In June, it will be 20 years since Veronica Guerin was shot dead on the Naas dual carriageway west of Dublin on her way back from appearing in court over a traffic fine. The Sunday Independent journalist had invented nicknames for Dublin’s criminals such as the Monk, the Penguin and the Viper. Among those she named upfront was the drugs importer John Gilligan, who is believed to have responded by ordering her killing in 1996. Having served a long sentence for drug-trafficking, Gilligan is a broken, isolated figure who no longer has any real allies or influence in Ireland’s underworld.

At the time of the journalist’s death, other crime figures including the Monk were furious with Gilligan, especially because his actions resulted in the creation of the Criminal Assets Bureau – a crime-fighting agency with wide-ranging powers to seize money and assets belonging to gangsters in the Republic. The CAB has been described as the greatest monument to Guerin’s legacy, and for a while it seemed to be working, as gangsters fled Ireland for Amsterdam, southern Spain and even Morocco to protect their ill-gotten gains.

The two main survivors of the state’s post-Guerin assault on Dublin’s underworld two decades ago are the Monk and Kinahan, who are now locked in a vicious tussle for control of the vast fortune to be made by importing drugs from South America and Asia via Spain into Ireland and, ultimately, Britain.

Joan Burton, Ireland’s deputy prime minister and Labour leader, who was also on the electoral hustings in Dublin yesterday, summed up the feeling of dismay over the extraordinary and bloody events that had unfolded in a hotel close to the city’s airport on Friday afternoon.

“We’re living in Ireland, not Mexico,” Burton said. “We have to ensure that we can deal with a small number of criminal gangs, and that the courts are able to prosecute and deal with the people who are responsible.”

THE CRIME LORDS

THE GENERAL Martin Cahill, shot dead by republicans in 1994, after being set up by rival gangsters. Cahill masterminded some of the most audacious robberies in Ireland, including the theft of the Beit paintings in the 1980s.

THE MONK Gerry Hutch, nicknamed for being “clean living” and having a modest lifestyle, despite the riches he made from crime. He was once one of the Republic’s top bank robbers and is estimated to have stolen up to €40m. He once made an out-of-court settlement with Ireland’s Criminal Asset Bureau for more than €1m. The gangster also has a sense of humour, setting up a luxury limousine business called CAB, Carry Any Body.

THE PENGUIN Regarded as one of the cleverest career criminals, he runs his drugs smuggling empire from Amsterdam and a palatial luxury villa in Morocco.

CHRISTY KINAHAN The head of the most powerful crime cartel in Ireland, which he runs from his home in the Costa del Sol. He has a string of convictions for heroin dealing from his youth onwards and used his time in prison to become fluent in several European languages and earn a number of university degrees. Estimated to run an empire worth about €1 billion, Kinahan’s sons Daniel and Christopher Jnr were arrested by Spanish police in 2010 as part of Operation Shovel, an international police investigation into the cartel, but neither man was charged.

JOHN GILLIGAN In charge of a gang that in 1996 murdered Veronica Guerin, Gilligan once ran a gang importing drugs and illegal cigarettes to Ireland. However, other Irish gangsters blamed him for bringing attention to their operations with the Guerin murder, especially the creation of the Criminal Assets Bureau. Since his release, there has been at least one attempt on his life.