Spanish police, investigating the shooting of an Irishman on the Costa del Sol, have tentatively ruled out any gangland involvement.

Johnny Mulligan, a 41 year old father of eighteen, was shot twenty-seven times in the head in Benalmadena, near Torremolinos on Saturday night. Initially it was thought the crime was related to his previous involvement with a Dublin drug-smuggling gang, or that he had become embroiled with the criminal element in the south of Spain.

However, detectives working the case have been questioning a local man in relation to the incident. A Spanish bar owner, Carlos Arantxa Sánchez Vicario was arrested earlier today and it is believed charges are imminent.

Beer, natural born killer

A close friend of the baker told the Irish Sentinel “I wouldn’t be surprised if he shot him and I wouldn’t blame him either. Every morning this man would come to Carlos’s bar and ask for ‘One beer, please’ and Carlos would say ‘Una cerveza, por favor?’ and he would say ‘Yeah, whatever’. He spoke in English all the time and Carlos just tried to help him learn a few basic Spanish phrases. I mean we are in Spain.

But he would simply refuse to learn and whenever Carlos didn’t understand the English he would simply say it again, slower and louder. Of course louder is going to make all the difference, isn’t it? One day Carlos said to me ‘I swear, one day I will shoot this man twenty-seven times in the head’.

At the time I thought he was just joking but it seems not. And there isn’t a judge in Spain who would convict him. These bastard English speakers coming over here expecting us to learn English. We don’t go to Ireland and expect them to learn Spanish, do we?”

When asked about Mulligan’s children must feel about their father’s death our source replied “My only regret is that Carlos didn’t kill all of them as well. Nits make non-Spanish speaking lice, don’t they?”

This latest killing brings to 14 the number of Irishmen who have perished in Spain since December 2008 although eight of them were crushed to death at the Porta Aventura theme park when a concession stand fell on them.