Attempt to smuggle mobile phone intercepted

AN ATTEMPT to smuggle a mobile phone inside a candle into prison was intercepted last week.

The candle had been moulded around a phone and taken into the country’s maximum security prison by a visitor of inmate Timmy Rattigan, who is serving life imprisonment for murder.

But, as with the normal procedure when a visitor brings in something for an inmate, the candle had to go through an X-ray machine.

It detected the object and when prison officers broke open the candle they found a mobile phone.

It is the latest innovative smuggling attempt to emerge at Portlaoise Prison.

Last Friday, a mobile phone was sent in by post inside a hollowed-out document, which was purporting to be a legal parcel sent by a solicitor.

An examination by an X-ray confirmed a suspicious object was contained within the parcel.

The Prison Service are satisfied that the package was intended for Jeremy Cooper, who is serving 14 years for false imprisonment.

Timmy Rattigan, aged 27, was sentenced to life in jail in July 2005 for the murder of 65-year-old grandmother Joan Casey in Tallaght, west Dublin, in April 2004.

Rattigan, from St Dominick’s Terrace in Tallaght, pleaded not guilty to the murder.

Rattigan appealed the verdict, but lost his appeal in March of last year.

A spokeswoman for the Prison Service said the

visitor who left the item had been banned from visiting the prison.

Rattigan is a cousin of Brian Rattigan, who is serving 10 years in Portlaoise Prison for two separate convictions.

Brian Rattigan, 26, from Cooley Road, Drimnagh, south-west Dublin, was sentenced to four years in 2004 for firing at a Garda patrol car with a shotgun before pointing it directly at a plain clothes officer.

He was sentenced to six years in May 2003 after being caught with €27,000 worth of heroin.

Meanwhile, the Prison Service yesterday said reports that Linda Mulhall, one of two sisters serving time for the murder of a Keynan man, was found with a mobile phone in her cell were not correct.