CAUGHT IN A MURDEROUS SPIRAL

The murder of three Irishmen in the Netherlands highlights the
challenge facing the European Union from increasingly vicious
organised criminal gangs, writes Jim Cusack, Security Correspondent,
from Scheveningen.

Criminals from former Yugoslavia are now established in organised
crime in northern Europe. Many of these people were involved in the
horrors of the civil war in the Balkans; both Serbian and Bosnian
gangs are said to be carrying gang violence to new depths in their
efforts to establish themselves in the world of organised crime.

The three Irishmen who were killed here a week ago may have been
victims of what is regarded as a spiralling round of murders.
Organised criminals are deter mined to enforce the rules of organised
crime and to fight back against the increasing success of police
forces, like the Dutch, which are trying to hold back the tide of
drugs and other crime in the stillnew borderless EU.

As part of this fight, the EU's police forces, including the Garda
Siochana, have joined forces and set up Europol, a criminal
intelligence and liaison organisation. By coincidence, Europol's
headquarters is in Scheveningen, the seaside resort and suburb of The
Hague and only a mile from the apartment building where the three
Irishmen met gruesome deaths last weekend.

Europol's "1998 - EU Organised Crime Situation Report" contains the
following observation in its chapter on organised crime in the Netherlands:
"All suspects from former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and Albania
engage in the use of violence."

Neighbours of the three Irishmen in the Gevers apartment building said
that in the last month or so they had seen at least one of them in the
company of an expensively dressed man of swarthy complexion. The men
who lived in the expensive apartment overlooking the North Sea at
Scheveningen are known to have been involved in the trade of synthetic
drugs, particularly amphetamine "speed" and ecstasy.

Indigenous Dutch criminal gangs control the trade in these drugs but
the chemicals used in their manufacture often come from former
communist bloc countries in eastern Europe. The supply of these
"precursor" chemicals is controlled by eastern European mafias, which
include people who were involved in the Balkan conflicts.

The former Yugoslavians have gained a fearsome reputation for
inflicting horrible violence on their opponents or people otherwise
targeted by them. There are suspicions that Dutch criminals, who still
dominate the cannabis and synthetic drugs markets, recruit them to
carry out "hits".

Local newspapers last year reported that one gang had brought in a hit
man from Chechnya to exact revenge on an enemy.

It is no longer seen as sufficient, according to sources here, simply
to carry out a normal assassination in the organised crime world. The
murders, it seems, must be accompanied by torture and mutilation.

The increasing incidence of such killings is seen as a response from
gangs to the increasing use of informants by the police to intercept
and seize drugs. The Dutch police, who have forged close links with
other EU forces including the Garda, have had considerable successes
against organised criminals; the murders of suspected informants is an
inevitable feature of this success.

According to reports in local newspapers, there are suspicions of all
sorts of violence from emasculation to dismemberment and burning are
being used by the criminals to deter their members for helping the
police.

The use of violence in intergang disputes is already traditional in
this country where Europol estimates there are organised criminal
gangs from 39 foreign countries operating.

There is a remarkable international mix almost covering the globe. It
is estimated there are 255 gangs of Dutch origin, many involved in
cannabis and synthe tic drug manufacture and distribution; 76 Turkish
gangs mainly involved in the importation of heroin; 26 gangs from the
former Dutch colony of Surinam (mainly cocaine importation); 19
Moroccan gangs involved in cannabis importation; and 18 Colombian
gangs involved in cocaine.

There is a bewildering and daunting variety of crimes in a country
which appears, on the surface, to be one of the most orderly and well
kept European nations.

Trafficking in human beings is noted in the Europol report as being
second to drug-trafficking as the most seriously regarded type of
offence involving organised crimes.

Turkish, Pakistani, Italian, Albanian, Iraqi, Chinese, German and
Iranian gangs are involved in this practice which involves taking
women from poor eastern European and other Third World countries for
the purpose of prostitution in the wealthy countries of Western Europe.

The Europol report on the Netherlands makes particular reference to
the use of "sanctions" within the ethnic groups and between gangs.
These take the form of intimidation, fines, kidnapping, sending
somebody back to their country of origin and the use of physical violence.

The Dutch police counted 26 killings involving Turkish and Yugoslavian
gangs in 1998. There were 11 killings and eight people injured in
cases where it was suspected people were helping the police.

It is somewhere in this stew of ethnically disparate but organised
crime that the three Irishmen met their deaths. Sources in the
otherwise highly circumspect Dutch police and Public Prosecutor's
office in The Hague have indicated to some local journalists that it
is possible that the Irishmen fell foul of organised criminals and
that a horrible sanction was imposed on them.

It is known that the Dutch police and Garda National Drugs Squad have
a close and successful relationship. It is also evident that some of
the major finds of drugs coming from the Netherlands to Ireland have
been the result of very good information.

This information has led to seizures in circumstances described in
police terms as "controlled deliveries". This is the situation where
police know about the origin but not the final destination of a drug
shipment. The drugs are allowed into the country under surveillance
and are then seized at the point where they are about to be collected.

This happened in a number of instances in the Republic, one of the
best known being the case of the seizure in 1996 of 13 tonnes of
cannabis in an articulated lorry in Urlingford, Co Kilkenny. The
Republic is used as a transit country for drug-traffickers. The losses
of such huge shipments are acutely felt by the organised gangs who set
about discovering the source of the police in telligence that led to
the intercep tions. It is in this matrix of criminality that the
Irishmen in Scheveningen were caught and died