Three more arrested over tiger kidnapping of banker

GARDAÍ have arrested three more people in relation to a tiger kidnapping of a bank official and her family last October.

The three are being questioned about the false imprisonment of the official’s two children and her husband at their home in Lucan, west Dublin, and the robbery of an estimated €300,000.

A gang of four armed and masked men forced their way into the family home in Johnsbridge estate in the early hours of October 23.

The children, aged just three and six, and their father were taken away in a van. The children’s mother, Nicola Wall, was directed to drive to work at the Bank of Ireland branch in Inchicore to get cash to secure the safe release of her family.

She told her colleagues and took away around €300,000 and left the cash in her car at a nearby car park. Her husband and children were later found unharmed.

Two men were arrested last May after a breakthrough in the investigation. Gardaí got a match to samples recovered from a car used in the tiger kidnapping with samples taken from a separate, high-profile investigation in Dublin.

One of the men arrested, a 42-year-old man, living near Crumlin village in south Dublin, is well known to local gardaí. A second man, aged 31, was picked up in the Phibsboro area of north Dublin.

Following further investigations, gardaí based in Lucan arrested three more people in the Crumlin area yesterday morning

Two of them, a man in his early 40s, and a female, in her mid-30s, were arrested under Section 50 of the Criminal Justice Act 2007, on suspicion of using a firearm during a false imprisonment.

The third person, a man aged in his late teens, was detained under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act 1939.

A car was also seized as part of the investigation and is undergoing forensic and DNA tests.