HAIR HE GOES

Gardai powerless if Hutch is cleared in court today. Separate probe into corrupt top garda has 'months to go'

- MICHAEL O'TOOLE

GARDAI will be powerless to stop Gerry Hutch walking free if he is acquitted of murder today because they have not completed a separate probe into him.

This paper has established that there are no charges outstanding against Hutch so he can simply walk out of the courtroom if the non-jury Special Criminal Court finds him not guilty of the 2016 murder of David Byrne.

Sources believe if freed he could leave the country and head back to Spain where he hid out during the Hutch gang's deadly feud with the rival Kinahan cartel.

It had been thought that elite detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation were close to completing their probe into suspicions Hutch had been working with corrupt ex-Garda superintendent John Murphy - but we have learned the investigation still has months to go.

That means gardai will have to sit on their hands and watch Hutch, who turned 60 on Tuesday, stroll out of the non-jury court at the Criminal Courts of Justice complex in central Dublin if he is acquitted.

"If he walks, he walks. There is nothing to stop him," a source said last night.

"That's the way of the world. There are no other charges outstanding against him here, so he will be able to walk out the exit of the CCJ and be gone. There will be nothing anyone can do.

Hutch is suspected of directing a crime gang as well as receiving confidential Garda information, allegedly from disgraced ex-superintendent Murphy, 62, who is now serving a six-and-a-half-year jail term for possessing cannabis at his Dublin home in 2021.

NBCI detectives have spent months on their investigation, which is separate to the Ballymun Garda Station probe into the attack on the Regency Airport Hotel in north Dublin in which Daniel Kinahan ally David Byrne, 33, was shot dead and for whose murder Hutch spent three months on trial.