Colleagues of gardaí caught with cocaine quizzed

A GARDA team are to interview colleagues of two gardaí who have been suspended after being caught with cocaine following a high-profile internal investigation.

Detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI) are stepping up their inquiries and are about to set up shop in the garda station where the officers are based.

One of the gardaí was under surveillance by the NBCI for some months before they moved in on him while he was socialising off duty last Monday morning, and found 8 grammes of cocaine in his pocket.

A second man, described as a “low-level” dealer, was arrested with him.

Two other off-duty gardaí were in the company of the garda in an early-house pub at the time.

Both were subjected to a drugs search and one of them, a male garda, was found with a small amount of cocaine on him. He was not arrested. The female garda had nothing on her and detectives are satisfied she had no knowledge of what was going on.

The first garda was detained under Section 2 of the Drug Trafficking Act on suspicion of selling or supplying drugs. He was released on Tuesday night.

Both gardaí were suspended pending the investigation.

Garda sources said the investigation team will not be rushing to the Director of Public Prosecutions with a straightforward file recommending prosecution for possession of drugs for personal use or of supplying drugs.

Sources said there were “three or four other lines of inquiry” that needed to be exhausted first before they submitted a file.

The investigations will try and determine whether or not there are more serious offences, such as supplying information to criminals. There is no evidence yet to suggest that, but senior sources said an exhaustive investigation has to be conducted.

The NBCI team will interview other gardaí in the unit in which the garda served. They will also talk to other gardaí in the station, examine his phone records and check his entries and enquiries on the Pulse computer system over the last 12 months.

They will be eager to see if he checked any entries linked to any associates in the drugs trade he may have had and what he did with that information.

Another, potentially serious, aspect of the investigation will be to check what prosecutions the garda has before the courts.