A MAN ACCUSED of being one of two gunmen who shot dead a nephew of Gerard ‘The Monk’ Hutch is linked to the killing by DNA, CCTV, and mobile phone evidence and should be found guilty of murder, the Special Criminal Court has heard.

Fiona Murphy SC, for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), delivered her closing speech to the three-judge, non-jury court this morning in the trial of Thomas ‘Nicky’ McConnell, who denies murdering 36-year-old Gareth Hutch in Dublin’s north inner city in 2016.

Murphy told the court that the only reasonable inference to be drawn from all the evidence is that McConnell was not just part of the planning but also the execution of the murder alongside Jonathan Keogh, who has already been convicted for his role.

McConnell is the fourth person to go on trial accused of the same murder. It is the prosecution’s case that McConnell and Jonathan Keogh used an apartment opposite Gareth Hutch’s home as a lookout spot and when Hutch emerged from his front door, they followed him and shot him dead.

Mary McDonnell, who lived at the lookout apartment, told the trial in June last year that she could identify Jonathan Keogh because she had known him for many years but she did not know the second man, who the prosecution alleges was McConnell.

When asked to identify the second man from CCTV footage showing McConnell in a shop later the same day, she said she was “not really one hundred per cent” and that she was “half and half”.

In her speech, Murphy cited DNA and CCTV evidence linking McConnell to a BMW that was parked in front of Gareth Hutch’s home and that the prosecution said was intended to be used as the getaway car. Murphy said CCTV showed that it was McConnell who parked the BMW the previous day in such a way as to make sure it could be used for an easy exit.

Following the shooting, counsel said, CCTV showed the two gunmen getting into the BMW but when they couldn’t start it, they ran away to a Skoda Octavia that the prosecution alleges had been parked nearby by McConnell that morning.

Inside the BMW, the back windows of which had been spray painted black, gardaí later found McConnell’s DNA, a can of petrol and two changes of clothes that Murphy said mark it out as a getaway car.

She further pointed to extensive phone contact between McConnell and the three other culprits before and after the murder.

A Blackberry phone linked to McConnell contained emails showing an “intimate knowledge of the murder” that could only have been known by someone involved, she said. The phone further showed that McConnell had been told to “get down the country” or to go to the UK following the shooting, which McConnell subsequently did, counsel said.

Murphy said that when stopped by gardai, the accused lied about his movements on the day “to cover up his presence at the scene” and lied about parking the BMW at Avondale the day before the murder.

While McDonnell said she was “not one hundred percent” in her identification of Mr McConnell, Murphy said the court can be satisfied that the accused is “at least very similar” to the man she saw in her apartment with Jonathan Keogh.

Mark Lynam SC will deliver his closing speech for the defence on Friday.

McConnell, 38, of Sillogue Gardens, Ballymun, Dublin 11 has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Gareth Hutch, 36, on 24 May, 2016 at Avondale House, North Cumberland Street, Dublin 1.

In November 2018 the Special Criminal Court found Regina Keogh, 47, of Cumberland St North, Dublin 1, Jonathan Keogh, 39, with an address at Gloucester Place, Dublin 1, and Thomas Fox, 32, with an address at Rutland Court, Dublin 1, guilty of the murder of Gareth Hutch.