Elite gardai seized nearly €25 million from Daniel Kinahan

The garda’s elite anti-gangland unit has now hit DanielKinahan and other gangsters for almost €25million in cash.

The Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau was set up in 2015 just before the deadly Kinahan-Hutch gang war erupted.

The figures were released in the wake of the bureau’s seizure of €488,000 in a lorry headed for Dublin on Monday evening.

It’s understood the cash belonged to a drugs gang and were the profits from its dealing operation that were being sent abroad to bosses there.

Sources said officers were last night trying to establish who owned the cash but a likely candidate was the mob run by Kinahan most of whose senior leaders are now overseas.

The crime bureau, led by Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland, has had 44-year-old Kinahan in its sights since that feud erupted.

More than 50 of his killers and henchmen have now been locked up.

But the unit, based in Dublin’s Harcourt Square, is also targeting Kinahan’s finances in Ireland as well as those of other gangs.

Figures show that last year alone, the elite squad seized €5.7million in gangs’ cash here, bringing the total to €24.3million since 2015.

And also last year the crime bureau won court permission to permanently seize, or forfeit, some €8.3million of the cash they took off the streets.

That has now been given to the Exchequer.

As well as seizing cash, bureau operations saw 16 people convicted last year of money laundering for gangs in relation to seized cash.

Garda Assistant Commissioner John O’Driscoll, who oversees the crime fighting unit, said yesterday that taking cash off gangs was a priority for his officers.

He continued: “Significant success has been achieved in recent times, in the course of operations and investigations undertaken by the [crime bureau].

“The targeting of relevant assets, in the first instance, followed by the locating and seizing of those assets and, later, by the charging and prosecuting of suspects, through use of money laundering and organised crime related legislative provisions, has been a key component of the organised crime related strategy adopted by An Garda Siochana and the [crime bureau].”

The Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau was also involved in the seizure of cocaine, cannabis, heroin and other drugs worth more than €60million last year.