UK police are convinced that the murder of John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, the legendary timeshare fraudster with links to the Brink’s Mat and Hatton Garden raids, was carried out by a Kinahan killer.
International assassin Imre Arakas, Dublin assassin James Quinn and another Kinahan rifle for rent from Ireland are now the main suspects for the unsolved murder carried out with sniper precision while Palmer was mowing the lawn.
Palmer’s murder on the grounds of his home in Essex in 2015 came when he retired from an extraordinary criminal career. So accurate was the impact that his death was not immediately processed into murder and officers believed he died of a heart attack or natural causes.
However, it was soon discovered that a contract killer had been locating him for days through a ‘spy hole’ in the fence, with the murder taking place in the only area of the garden that was not covered by circuit television.
In the weeks before his death, Palmer and 10 others, including his partner Richard Cashman, would all be tried over property fraud in Tenerife, with speculation that Palmer was seeking an agreement with prosecutors.
Cashman, a longtime collaborator of Christy Kinahan Snr, was one of those who attended the 2017 wedding of Daniel Kinahan and Caoimhe Robinson at the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai hosted by UK Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials was kept under secret supervision. Cashman was spotted with his wife, Leanne, at the luxury ceremony.
‘Goldfinger’ was nicknamed after his acquittal of handling gold in the £ 26 million Brink’s Mat raid in 1983 and has been linked to some of those convicted of the 2015 £ 14 million Hatton Garden raid .
International assassin Imre Arakas was allegedly in the UK in the weeks before the murder, while Quinn and another suspected Kinahan shooter were also framed by officers in the UK as they moved in and out of the country and traveled. on fake passports at the time.
Cashman moved from his base in Spain to Dubai after British police questioned him in connection with the murder of his former boss.
‘Goldfinger’ was once reportedly worth £ 300 million, but was 64 and retired from crime.
Arakas was arrested in Dublin when he planned to kill Kinahan target James ‘Mago’ Gately in 2017.
Details of the attempted murder were given to the court which suggested that Arakas would work alone and use a target rifle and silencer.
He planned to kill Gately with ‘one shot in the head’ in a car park near the flat where he lived in Northern Ireland.
Prior to his arrest, Arakas was tracked down by officers who followed him from Dublin Airport to the city center where he bought a number of items, including a wig.
He then took a walk through the northern city center and visited the home of Kinahan target Patsy Hutch before visiting the scene where Gareth Hutch was killed the previous May.
When he was arrested the next morning, he sent messages to two encrypted phones that allegedly belonged to the wanted killer Sean McGovern and crime boss Daniel Kinahan.
The first time the Kinahan crowd was linked to the Palmer murder was on an anonymous Twitter website set up after the Regency Hotel incident.
The website known as ‘The Whistleblower’ indicated that the Kinahan group had killed Palmer in favor of a partner and that one of the three men currently on the suspect list had carried it out.