The business executive who was abducted and tortured near the Irish border has spoken for the first time about a crime that has shocked and bewildered Ireland.
Kevin Lunney said the gang that kidnapped him went through a checklist of sadistic acts which left him in agony.
“I think certainly the breaking the leg was on the list, it was, ‘we have to rough you up, we have to mark you’,” Lunney, a father of six, told BBC Spotlight in a programme aired on Tuesday.
Masked men ambushed Lunney, 50, on 17 September outside his home in Derrylin, County Fermanagh, in Northern Ireland, and tortured him for about two hours before dumping him across the border in County Cavan.
It was the latest and most brutal act in an eight-year campaign of intimidation against executives of Quinn Industrial Holdings (QIH), a building materials company that straddles the border.
Lunney, the company’s operations director, said a car reversed at high speed into his vehicle as he drove up a lane. Attackers smashed the windows, dragged him out and bundled him into the boot of another car. He tried in vain to escape, prompting whacks to his head. He overheard a captor reporting to someone on the phone addressed as “boss”.
The men hooded him, transferred him to a horse box and ordered him and other executives to resign from QIH. Lunney agreed but the violence continued.
The gang jabbed a utility knife under his nails and rubbed bleach into the wounds. “It was excruciating, the pain of the bleach – I was screaming,” he recalled.
They cut off his clothes and doused his face with bleach. “There was a lot of fumes, I started to cough and almost passed out.”
They broke his leg with a baseball bat or part of a fence. “I heard it breaking. I roared. The pain was awful.” One attacker was unsure it had broken, he said. “He said to the other guy who was holding the torch, ‘Did that snap?’ And the guy said ‘No’.” They broke the leg again close to the first break. “It was a hundred times worse the second time. As soon as he finished that, he said, ‘Now we have to mark you’.”
They scraped his face – Lunney has grown a beard to hide the marks – then carved QIH on his chest, saying they had to make him remember. Dumped on a road, freezing, bloodied and in agony, Lunney said he thought he would die. A tractor driver found him and summoned help.
QIH is a remnant of a business empire built by Seán Quinn, an entrepreneur who became Ireland’s richest man before losing his fortune and companies in a bet on a toxic bank.
Quinn, 71, has accused QIH executives of betraying him but vehemently denied any involvement in the intimidation campaign. He condemned the attack on Lunney as barbaric and said he feared being blamed.
The chief executive of QIH, Liam McCaffrey, this week told the Garda Síochána commissioner, Drew Harris, that failure to find those responsible would leave the community in fear and imperil the local economy.
Last week gardaí took down a roadside sign that accused executives of having inflated salaries.
