Criminals from former Yugoslavia are now established in organised crime in northern Europe. Many of these people were involved in the horrors of the civil war in the Balkans; both Serbian and Bosnian gangs are said to be carrying gang violence to new depths in their efforts to establish themselves in the world of organised crime.

The three Irishmen who were killed here a week ago may have been victims of what is regarded as a spiralling round of murders. Organised criminals are deter mined to enforce the rules of organised crime and to fight back against the increasing success of police forces, like the Dutch, which are trying to hold back the tide of drugs and other crime in the stillnew borderless EU.

As part of this fight, the EU's police forces, including the Garda Siochana, have joined forces and set up Europol, a criminal intelligence and liaison organisation. By coincidence, Europol's headquarters is in Scheveningen, the seaside resort and suburb of The Hague and only a mile from the apartment building where the three Irishmen met gruesome deaths last weekend.

Europol's "1998 - EU Organised Crime Situation Report" contains the following observation in its chapter on organised crime in the Netherlands: "All suspects from former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and Albania engage in the use of violence."

Neighbours of the three Irishmen in the Gevers apartment building said that in the last month or so they had seen at least one of them in the company of an expensively dressed man of swarthy complexion. The men who lived in the expensive apartment overlooking the North Sea at Scheveningen are known to have been involved in the trade of synthetic drugs, particularly amphetamine "speed" and ecstasy.

Indigenous Dutch criminal gangs control the trade in these drugs but the chemicals used in their manufacture often come from former communist bloc countries in eastern Europe. The supply of these "precursor" chemicals is controlled by eastern European mafias, which include people who were involved in the Balkan conflicts.

The former Yugoslavians have gained a fearsome reputation for inflicting horrible violence on their opponents or people otherwise targeted by them. There are suspicions that Dutch criminals, who still dominate the cannabis and synthetic drugs markets, recruit them to carry out "hits".

Local newspapers last year re ported that one gang had brought in a hit man from Chechnya to exact revenge on an enemy.

It is no longer seen as sufficient, according to sources here, simply to carry out a normal assassination in the organised crime world. The murders, it seems, must be accompanied by torture and mutilation.

The increasing incidence of such killings is seen as a response from gangs to the increasing use of informants by the police to intercept and seize drugs. The Dutch police, who have forged close links with other EU forces including the Garda, have had considerable successes against organised criminals; the murders of suspected informants is an inevitable feature of this success.

According to reports in local newspapers, there are suspicions of all sorts of violence from emasculation to dismemberment and burning are being used by the criminals to deter their members for helping the police.

The use of violence in intergang disputes is already traditional in this country where Europol estimates there are organised criminal gangs from 39 foreign countries operating.

There is a remarkable international mix almost covering the globe. It is estimated there are 255 gangs of Dutch origin, many involved in cannabis and synthetic drug manufacture and distribution; 76 Turkish gangs mainly involved in the importation of heroin; 26 gangs from the former Dutch colony of Surinam (mainly cocaine importation); 19 Moroccan gangs involved in cannabis importation; and 18 Colombian gangs involved in cocaine.

There is a bewildering and daunting variety of crimes in a country which appears, on the surface, to be one of the most orderly and well kept European nations.

Trafficking in human beings is noted in the Europol report as being second to drug-trafficking as the most seriously regarded type of offence involving organised crimes.

Turkish, Pakistani, Italian, Albanian, Iraqi, Chinese, German and Iranian gangs are involved in this practice which involves taking women from poor eastern European and other Third World countries for the purpose of prostitution in the wealthy countries of Western Europe.

The Europol report on the Netherlands makes particular reference to the use of "sanctions" within the ethnic groups and between gangs. These take the form of intimidation, fines, kidnapping, sending somebody back to their country of origin and the use of physical violence.

The Dutch police counted 26 killings involving Turkish and Yugoslavian gangs in 1998.

There were 11 killings and eight people injured in cases where it was suspected people were helping the police.

It is somewhere in this stew of ethnically disparate but organised crime that the three Irishmen met their deaths. Sources in the otherwise highly circumspect Dutch police and Public Prosecutor's office in The Hague have indicated to some local journalists that it is possible that the Irishmen fell foul of organised criminals and that a horrible sanction was imposed on them.

It is known that the Dutch police and Garda National Drugs Squad have a close and successful relationship. It is also evident that some of the major finds of drugs coming from the Netherlands to Ireland have been the result of very good information.

This information has led to seizures in circumstances described in police terms as "controlled deliveries". This is the situation where police know about the origin but not the final destination of a drug shipment. The drugs are allowed into the country under surveillance and are then seized at the point where they are about to be collected.

This happened in a number of instances in the Republic, one of the best known being the case of the seizure in 1996 of 13 tonnes of cannabis in an articulated lorry in Urlingford, Co Kilkenny.

The Republic is used as a transit country for drug-traffickers. The losses of such huge shipments are acutely felt by the organised gangs who set about discovering the source of the police intelligence that led to the interceptions. It is in this matrix of criminality that the Irishmen in Scheveningen were caught and died.