Gilligan partying at house in Dublin after prison release

John Gilligan is attending a "welcome home party" after being released from Portlaoise Prison this morning.

The 61-year-old walked free shortly after 9.30am this morning and was collected in a Ford Mondeo by two men.

He was jailed in 2001 after being convicted on drug trafficking charges but had been in garda custody since 1996.

Dressed in a light grey shirt and black trousers, Gilligan held his head up and smiled broadly as he emerged through the large wooden prison gates.

He carried a black suit jacket, paper bag and newly pressed shirt wrapped in a dry cleaning bag to the car, in which two men were waiting.

Afterwards he went to a house in Dublin where it is said a party had been planned for him and reporters have claimed that some of them were threatened by some of Gilligan's cohorts.

The Ballyfermot man maintains he was only targeted by police after the murder of mother-of-one journalist Veronica Guerin.

The journalist embarked on a crusade to expose in the Sunday Independent the ruthless dealings of drugs barons in Ireland in the mid-1990s.

But her high-profile war against gangsters ended when a gunman on a motorbike shot her dead as she waited at traffic lights in Naas Road, Dublin, on June 26 1996.

Her murder outraged the public and gardaí, who vowed to track down her killers.

The criminal investigation that followed was one of the largest in the history of the state and led to more than 150 arrests and the setting-up of the CAB.

Gilligan, a career criminal who was first convicted at the age of 15, was the chief suspect.

He was accused of ordering the murder when charges were brought against him for a vicious assault on Ms Guerin as she tried to quiz him over where his gang got the cash for designer clothes, expensive cars and exotic foreign holidays.

He was detained in the UK four months later and eventually extradited to Ireland in February 2000.

Gilligan was later acquitted of Ms Guerin’s murder and firearms charges, but convicted of possession of an estimated 20,000kg (44,093lb) of cannabis resin for sale and supply over two years.

He was handed a record 28 years behind bars, which was later reduced on appeal to 20 years and backdated to 1996.