'Supergrass' heading for new life abroad

The supergrass whose evidence helped jail four members of the Dublin drugs gang that killed journalist Veronica Guerin has started a new life out of prison, it emerged today.

It is understood that Charles Bowden, 38, was released from Dublin’s Arbour Hill prison, where he was serving a six-year sentence for drugs and firearms offences, early yesterday morning.

He is expected to move abroad with his girlfriend under Ireland’s witness protection scheme.

Bowden was an integral part of the massive cannabis importation racket run by John Gilligan, himself recently sentenced to a record 28 years in jail for his role in its operation.

Following the shooting of the Sunday Independent investigative crime reporter as she sat in her car at traffic lights on the outskirts of Dublin in June 1996, suspicion fell on the gang.

Bowden was arrested in October and agreed to give evidence against his former associates in exchange for a reduced sentence and partial immunity.

Two of them, Paul Ward and Brian Meehan, are currently serving life sentences for Ms Guerin’s murder after being convicted at Dublin’s Special Criminal Court in 1998 and 1999 respectively.

Bowden confessed to cleaning and loading the .375 Magnum used in the killing but claimed he had no knowledge of the planned "hit".

But in Ward’s trial, the judge described Bowden as "a vicious criminal ... who would lie without hesitation and regardless of the consequences for others if he perceived it to be in his own interest to do so".

And in the trial of Meehan, who drove the motorcycle used in the killing, the defendant’s barrister pointed out there was more hard evidence linking Bowden with the murder than any other member of the suspected hit team.

The pillion passenger who fired six rounds into Ms Guerin as she sat at the wheel has never been convicted.

Gang leader Gilligan was cleared last month of ordering Ms Guerin’s death, but Bowden’s evidence helped pin 15 drugs importation and possession charges on him, as it did in the drugs convictions of Meehan and a fourth gang member, Patrick Holland.

Bowden was born in Finglas, Dublin, and served in the army for six years in the 1980s, before being discharged over an alleged assault on a young recruit.

But he used his knowledge of weapons to become the gang’s armourer, controlling a stash of semi-automatic pistols, a machine pistol and a submachine gun that was kept in a grave in a Jewish cemetery.

He has a wife, from whom he is separated, and two children, who are now also under the witness protection scheme.