International manhunt continues for gunmen in Regency Hotel shooting

Dissident republicans claim they carried out a horrific gun attack in a Dublin hotel which left one man dead and two others injured.

Six people are being hunted in connection with the attack at the Regency Hotel, three of whom were armed with assault rifles and wore outfits similar to a police SWAT team.

The boxing event, which had been scheduled for the National Stadium tonight, has now been cancelled.

It came ahead of a Battle of the Families boxing fight between Portuguese fighter Antonio Joao Bento and Dubliner Jamie Kavanagh. A third man was disguised as a woman and another was described as stocky wearing a beige cap.

“Other men were armed but we didn’t know if [they] were with the men pretending to be gardaí or shooting at them”.

Local sources named the victim as Eddie Hutch Sr, brother of Gerry “The Monk” Hutch, a notorious Irish career criminal shot dead in Spain last September. In 2014, Jamie Kavanagh’s father Gerard Kavanagh, a known gang enforcer, was shot and killed in a bar in Dublin, and the shooting of former boxer Jamie Moore was tied to the gang wars as well.

Detectives are running a number of lines of inquiries including that the discriminate attack, which targeted Byrne and two others who remain in hospital, was an escalation of a dispute between drugs gangs based in Dublin and the Costa del Sol.

The gunmen, thought to be gangsters, fled the scene and a burnt out van was found shortly after the shooting in the Marino area of the city.

“I jumped over the receptionist’s desk and got on the ground and I started shouting, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, ‘ and I think I actually said ‘I’m innocent'”.

The BBC report that one of the gunmen pointed his weapon at BBC Radio Foyle reported Kevin McAnena, who said he had “never felt terror like it”.

Witness Mel Christle, president of the Boxing Union of Ireland, was standing on a podium where the last of the boxers weighing in had just stood down when the gunfire erupted outside the room. “There was a horrific cracking noise in front of me”, he told the Press Association.

PA Garda officers attend the scene on Poplar Row, North Strand following the shooting of a second man in Dublin, in an apparent gangland feud which is suspected to involve drugs gangs in Ireland and Spain.

He added: “This will not be an isolated incident”. “Thanks you for asking”.

In the aftermath, Kavanagh expressed his relief on Twitter: “I was lucky today is all I can say”.