This article is from page 12 of the 2008-07-08 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 12 JPG
“TM NOT LYING EYES.” That was the message delivered to the jury by Sharon Collins, who told the trial that her life had been stolen.
Una Ni Raifeartaigh, BL, for the prosecution, put it to her in cross-ex- amination, “You are lying eyes.”
Ms Collins replied, “I’m not. I sup- pose you can say that. It’s your job to bring in a guilty verdict. I’m not lying eyes. I didn’t go into lyingeyes. I didn’t know anything about lyin-
geyes until the guards told me. I cer- tainly wasn’t accessing a hitman.”
“IT wrote to the DPP and asked for somebody to investigate the theft of my life, but they chose not to do that,’ she said.
“I think the position I find myself in 1s ludicrous. I don’t believe for a moment that anyone ever intended to kill three people. I think if some- body would set out to do something like that, they would try to cover their tracks,” she added.
Counsel said the discovery of the
poison ricin would suggest that, to which the defendant replied, “I don’t know anything about that, but I can certainly say I didn’t intend to have three people killed.”
She rejected suggestions by Ms Ni Raifeartaigh that “it’s fabrication from start to finish. It’s not a story,” said Ms Collins.
She said that she sent €15,000 re- lating to a blackmail “to an address I was given. I didn’t know anything about Essam Eid. I think if I was paying somebody to kill, it would
be very obvious to me that it would be traceable,’ she said. Asked about calls between her phone and Essam Eid’s number, she said that a man was blackmailing her.
“T think at the time, I couldn’t be sure if if was One man or two men. I don’t know who was ringing me. It was very hard to know where the calls were coming from,” she said.
Ms Ni Raifeartaigh put it to her that some of the language used in the emails was similar to Ms Collins’ language.
The defendant said she accepted that, “but I don’t know what was go- ing on, but some of it was definitely not my language.”
When one of the emails sent by lyingeyes was read out to her in court, she said, “It’s dreadful, but certainly not written by me.”
She said she would never get over the shock of the emails. Earlier, asked by her own Senior Counsel Paul O’Higgins did she solicit or conspire with anyone, she said, “Ab- solutely not” and shook her head.