Gang boss Brendan Kinlan
A NOTORIOUS gang boss who was brutally beaten in a vicious assault in an English jail will never recover from his injuries, it is feared.
Brendan Kinlan (45), who once ruled the gangland scene on Ireland’s east coast from his base in Bray, Co Wicklow, remains in a critical condition in an English hospital.
He was savagely attacked at Lindholme Prison in Yorkshire at 8am on Tuesday, January 5. It has now emerged that medics at a Leeds hospital attempted to take him off a life support machine at the weekend, but were unsuccessful as his condition is so serious.
“It looks like he will never get better at this stage,” a source said.
Gardai are unaware why Kinlan was attacked in the English jail, but it is not linked to criminal activity in Ireland.
Kinlan was jailed for eight years in April 2012, at Leeds Crown Court after a jury found him guilty of possession of over €2million worth of amphetamines, which was discovered by police after he crashed his van to avoid hitting a pheasant.
South Yorkshire police have arrested an inmate at the jail for the attack, but he was later released without charge and returned to the prison.
Kinlan’s three-day trial heard how he was on the M1 near Wakefield, West Yorkshire,when his vehicle spun out of control and hit the central reservation before spinning back across the road and ending up on the hard shoulder.
Despite the small white van being badly smashed on October 24 last year, Kinlan walked away unharmed. Leeds Crown Court heard that Kinlan told an off-duty postman, who stopped at the scene of the crash that he“was trying to swerve to miss a pheasant”.
Following the accident, Kinlan, originally from Bray but living in Middlesbrough at the time of the offence, was left with a car that he couldn’t drive and unable to continue with his delivery of “a massive consignment of controlled drugs”.
When police came to the crash scene and took Kinlan’s details, they realised they didn’t match the details for the van.
This would prove a problem for him in subsequent days as he tried to retrieve his cargo from the vehicle.
Gardai believe the drugs were destined for the Irish market.
Kinlan’s associates are suspected of a spate of murders linked to a gangland reign of terror.
Kinlan was previously questioned by gardai, although never charged, over the double murder of ‘Fat’ Freddie Thompson gang members Darren Geoghegan (26) and Gavin Byrne (30), who were killed by their own mob in an internal power struggle.
Ken Foy
The Herald