The Donegal man caught with the rifles used in the Regency Hotel shooting today broke his silence.
Shane Rowan (44), originally from Killygordon, told the Irish Daily Mirror he agreed to pay €30,000 for the weapons.
In the first part of the bombshell interview, the convicted dissident IRA member spoke exclusively to the paper about his direct involvement in transporting the AK-47s used in the killing of David Byrne – as well as his dealings with Jonathan Dowdall and Patsy Hutch.
Rowan spent five and a half years in prison after he says he was ‘caught red handed’ transporting the three rifles from the Malahide industrial estate in north Dublin, where he had earlier met with Patsy Hutch – on March 9, 2016.
“I was caught red handed. So why even bother? All you’re doing is putting yourself under pressure and through a court case. Just get it done, get your time done and get out. I don’t regret it,” Rowan told the Mirror.
“When I’m sitting on my deathbed, at least I can say I done something.”
Gardai apprehended Rowan in Slane, Co Meath, just over a month on from the Regency and weeks after the IRA man had met Dowdall and Gerry Hutch at his home in Donegal to allegedly arrange peace talks.
Garda ballistic experts later determined that the rifles discovered in the boot of Rowan’s car were the same ones used by the tactical team that shot and killed Kinahan cartel associate David Byrne in the foyer of the Regency Hotel on February 5, 2016.
Speaking today for the first time Shane Rowan claims he agreed to pay the Hutch gang €10,000 per rifle, planning to then “put them to bed” by burying them – until they might one day be used.
However, he says when the job went “tits up” the money was never paid.
“10 grand each. That was the going price. Somebody offers you weapons for sale, you either say yes or say no. Now normally if I was 100 percent certain that they were the same weapons [used in the Regency] I wouldn’t have been down in Dublin getting them.
“They would have been dropped into the north,” he said. “But if they had told us out straight that it was the same weapons then I would still have taken them. A weapon is a weapon, let’s be real here.”
“We’re in that game. I’m not going to question every weapon I get. It’s just not done. No armed group would ever question the background of something.”
Read the full report on www.irishmirror.ie
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