It will, you’d hope, come as something of a relief to the families of Michael Snee and Aiden Moffitt that their killer, Yousef Palani, has pleaded guilty to their murder, avoiding the need for a lengthy trial and the airing of upsetting evidence about their killings. In Ireland, the mandatory sentence for murder is life imprisonment, and that is what Palani is now facing. There is some justice in that, though not enough, for my money.
For the rest of us, however, his guilty plea might be considered a misfortune for the similar reasons to those that make it welcome for the families of his victims. While none would wish to hear the gory details of the acts themselves, there are obvious questions that need to be asked pertaining to his motives, and to his circumstances. The answers to those questions, to date, have been very deeply unsatisfactory.
For example, the Irish Independent this week reported that Gardai found, at Palani’s home, an enormous sum in cash. We are assured by unnamed Garda sources that the cash “is the subject of an ongoing CAB (criminal assets bureau) investigation, but is not believed to have originated from criminality”. That is a contradiction in terms: Why would the Criminal Assets Bureau be investigating that which is not believed to be a criminal asset? If the cash was easily explained, why is there an investigation at all?
There is another, more disturbing possibility. From just last year:
In the five-year period between 2017 and 2021 there were 30 arrests of people in relation to Islamic extremism. In five years before that there had been just one.
According to the Garda, the majority of these arrests related to investigations of terrorist financing. Cases included suspects making personnel donations to terrorist groups in Iraq and Syria as well as trying to raise money from others.
Here we have a case where somebody has committed two murders of gay men, and then, we are told, gone straight to his local mosque to pray. That suggests a religious person, and somebody whose crimes fit the internationally recognised profile of Islamic extremism. Then we have a large, unexplained quantity of cash being investigated by the criminal assets bureau, in a country where 30 people have been arrested in the past five years for potentially financing Islamic terrorism.
And yet the Gardai are transparently eager to play that angle down. Here’s how they described his motives:
“For want of a better word, he can be described as a lone wolf and no particular ideology has been discovered to indicate why he did what he did. No one knows exactly why he did it. He was not radicalized or anything like that – it was like he literally came out of nowhere,” one source said.
“This is an individual who was in third-level education, came from a good family and had never been on the garda radar for anything.”
One unfortunate tendency in the media in Ireland is to treat statements from the Gardai with less skepticism than statements from other state organisations are treated. In this case, there is no particular reason not to believe that the Gardai have what might be termed a “public order” interest in presenting Palani’s actions as the entirely inexplicable and mysterious acts of a madman. The evidence that is in the public domain suggests their statement should be viewed with skepticism. Add to that the obsession of every state institution, in the modern age, with not providing fodder to the “far right”, and there are reasons to be deeply distrustful of “unnamed garda sources”.
Note the bizarre claim, for example, that Palani was “not radicalised”. One might wonder how that can be said of somebody who has just committed the planned and coldly executed murders of two gay men, and then gone to a mosque to pray. Are those the actions of an unradicalised person? If they are, one tends to fear what the truly radicalised might do.
Then note the line about how Palani had a third level education and came from a good family – you’d think the Gardai did not know that Osama Bin Laden was an Oxford-educated Engineer from one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. In fact, people from good families, internationally, are vastly more likely than the average criminal, when they commit crimes like this, to do it for ideological reasons rather than the mundane. Poor people murder for love or money. Rich people, often, murder for power or ideology.
As for the claim that Palani was a “lone wolf” and not a member of any organisation, that assertion is conspicuously at odds with the presence of the cash, and the Gardai’s investigation of the cash. If it were easily explained – family money, for example – it would not require investigation. So how can the Gardai rule out the involvement of an organisation before they can satisfactorily explain the cash? If the question of where the money came from is unresolved, how can you rule out the involvement of a group?
Naturally, these quotes were all provided to the Independent anonymously, and not from named Gardai, therefore pinning the organisation down on the contradictions within those quotes is something that one cannot do. You get the usual: A conveniently narrative-shaping briefing from “Garda sources”, and a firm ticking off from the Garda press office about how it does not comment on anonymous sources, if you ask.
Now, perhaps there are answers to those questions, which doubtless would have come out at trial under cross examination from defence barristers. Alas, there will not be a trial, so we are left to trust the boys in blue to be straight with us, even though they have an obvious incentive to play down any question that these crimes might have had a religious or terror-related motive.
That incentive, if you’re wondering, could not be clearer: Had it turned out that Palani was a motivated Islamic extremist, there might well be difficult questions for the state about how he got here, and was admitted, and went undetected. In the context of the ongoing immigration debate, there will be a great many of the great and the oh-so-very-good in Ireland happy that those questions need not be explored. A close shave, so to speak.
As I said above, it is good that for the families, there will not be a trial. But unfortunately, the absence of a trial is also a boon to those “unnamed Garda sources”, who get, as ever, to spin a yarn that does not, entirely, add up.