Gilligan threw his weight around but didn't know things had moved on

GANGSTERS mounted a murder bid on John Gilligan because he was throwing his weight around after his release from prison, a top investigator reveals today.

- BY MICHAEL O'TOOLE Crime and Defence Editor

"He was trying to call in debts... he was annoying people," Noel Browne tells the Sunday Mirror of the 2014 assassination attempt on Gilligan which he was lucky to survive.

Mr Browne, who spent 41 years as a Garda detective fighting organised crime and helped dismantle Gilligan's massive drugs network in the 1990s, tells us it was no surprise to him that the gangster was shot just months after his release from Portlaoise Prison in October 2013.

"It was not an awful shock," he says of the attack - blamed on the Kinahan gang - in which he was targeted at a family member's home in Clondalkin, west Dublin, in March 2014.

FLED

Gilligan - whose gang murdered Ms Guerin in June 1996 - had just been released after serving a 17-year jail term for drugs offences when the gunmen came for him.

He was shot several times by a two-man gang, but somehow managed to survive. He spent days in hospital before he fled Ireland and is now living in Spain, where he is currently facing fresh drugs charges.

But Mr Browne, who retired as a Garda detective inspector last December, investigated Gilligan over the Guerin murder.