Daniel Kinahan is set to go on trial at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin on a single criminal charge, The Irish Times has learned.

The State plans to produce evidence it says proves the 48-year-old Dubliner has been the leader of the Kinahan cartel for years as its undisputed director of operations.

Gardaí believe they have secured evidence proving Kinahan has been in an unparalleled position of power and influence at the top of Irish organised crime, controlling and directing other senior criminal figures with most of the evidence relating to the period from 2015 to 2017.

[ Kinahan cartel ‘spread misery and death’, says Garda CommissionerOpens in new window ]

The case will involve other evidence going back a number of years, to the period Kinahan first became involved in a dispute with former cartel associate Gary Hutch, who was shot dead in Spain in September 2015.

The prosecution will set out how that dispute began, resulting in the Hutch faction acrimoniously leaving the Kinahan cartel, and both sides feuding in the years that followed.

Just one charge, directing the activities of a criminal organisation, has been approved by the Director of Public Prosecutions against Daniel Kinahan, arising from a Garda inquiry completed in the summer of 2023. That charge carries a term of life imprisonment on conviction.

Though his father and cartel founder Christy Kinahan, and his brother, Christopher jnr, who live in Dubai, have yet to face charges, they remain under investigation by the Garda and international law enforcement. Rewards of up to $5 million (€4.25 million) for information leading to the arrest and convictions of the Kinahans remain on offer from US law enforcement.

Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly said on Tuesday the arrest of Daniel Kinahan in Dubai last Friday, on foot of an extradition request from the Republic, had come about after years of work by the Garda’s Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, which is led by Det Chief Supt Séamus Boland.

Former assistant commissioner John O’Driscoll, who retired in 2022 and died in September 2024, had also helped secure vital international co-operation to target the cartel, with former commissioner Drew Harris also heavily involved.

“This work resulted in an international coalition including An Garda Síochána, the US treasury department, US homeland security, the DEA [drugs enforcement administration], FBI, the United Kingdom’s national crime agency and Europol coming together four years ago to disrupt and dismantle the Kinahan organised crime gang,” said Kelly, who insisted that international investigation was continuing.

Kinahan, who has lived in Dubai since 2016, when the Hutch gang tried to murder him at the Regency Hotel in Dublin, has been in custody since his arrest by Dubai police last Friday. It is expected he will remain in custody there until his extradition, which could take months.

According to sources familiar with the case, some of the evidence against him is from encrypted devices used by the cartel. However, evidence from the EncroChat system will not play a significant role, if any, during prosecution of the case.

Many of the crimes Kinahan will be alleged to have directed are violent offences committed or planned during the Kinahan-Hutch feud.

The case against him will also centre on the cartel’s core drug-dealing business, with evidence related to drug trafficking and money laundering set to feature.

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Gardaí appear most confident about the evidence that will be produced to support the allegation that Kinahan directed feud-related violence.

Messages have been found on a number of encrypted devices seized by gardaí during feud-related arrest operations in Dublin in 2017.

Gardaí believe some messages, directing extreme violence, were written by Kinahan. The Blackberries were run on a system of PGP (pretty good privacy) encryption and were used by the cartel at the time.

Messages could be wiped from the phones remotely, meaning if a suspect was arrested and their phone was seized, it could be wiped clean by somebody else in the Kinahan cartel before being analysed by law enforcement.

However, analysis has retrieved many of the messages the cartel’s criminals believed were wiped.