Gangster John Gilligan has been ordered to stand trial later today in Spain on drugs and weapons charges.
The convicted drug dealer, prosecuted but acquitted over journalist Veronica Guerin’s murder, was warned he faces more than eight years in jail if convicted. State prosecutors demanded an 18-month prison sentence for unlawful weapons possession.
It came after a gun Spanish police linked to the Irish crime reporter’s 1996 assassination was found hidden in the garden of Gilligan’s Costa Blanca home. Detectives said when he was arrested in October 2020 the gun was the “same make and model” as the one used to kill Guerin in an ambush in June 1996.
