A FORMER Las Vegas poker dealer accused of conspiring with a Clare woman to kill her partner and his two sons told gardaí he didn’t know how a contact lens case that tested positive for the deadly toxin ricin came to be in his cell at Limerick prison, a jury at the Central Criminal Court heard.
Essam Eid (52), an Egyptian with a Las Vegas address, and Sharon Collins (45), Ballybeg House, Kildysart Road, Ennis, have pleaded not guilty to conspiring to kill PJ, Robert and Niall Howard between August 1st, 2006, and September 26th, 2006. Ms Collins also denies hiring Mr Eid to kill the three men.
Mr Eid denies demanding €100,000 from Robert Howard to cancel the contracts. He also denies breaking into the Howard family business in Ennis and stealing two computers, computer cables, a digital clock and a poster of old Irish money and then handling the stolen items.
Mr Eid told gardaí he had never worn contact lenses and at one point accused them of planting the case in his cell, Det Garda Jarlaith Fahy told prosecuting counsel Úna Ní Raifeartaigh.
He said Mr Eid denied having a conversation with him in Limerick prison, where Mr Eid had been held since his arrest following the burglary of the Howard family business in September 2006, in which he told him his contact lenses had been lost two months after his arrival in prison.
Mr Eid also denied having anything to do with e-mails sent to and from the address hire_hitman@yahoo.com. He told gardaí his name did not appear once in the e-mails and they didn’t even sound like him. He said he was not the only person who used the computer at his house and that either of his two wives, Lisa Eid or Teresa Engle, could have sent them. He denied having any knowledge of a recipe for ricin found on a computer seized at his home in Las Vegas.
The jury also heard from Emma Stubberfield, a microbiologist who worked in conjunction with LGC Limited to test for toxins for the British home office. On Friday the jury heard that gardaí flew the contact lens case by military jet to the LGC laboratory to get confirmation of an earlier field test which tested positive for ricin.
Ms Stubberfield described the procedure used to test for the deadly plant-based toxin.
She told prosecuting counsel Tom O’Connell SC that of three samples she received, one was a control sample and the other two were taken from each side of the lens case. She said that the first sample from the case gave a weak positive result but the second gave a much stronger result and indicated that ricin was present.
She told Jonathan Bowman, defending Ms Collins, that the test had been fully validated to test for ricin although she agreed that there were some non-toxic compounds that would have bonded with the antibodies used to create the positive result.
Det Michael Moloney told Ms Ní Raifeartaigh, Ms Collins denied sending e-mails to Tony Luciano at hire_hitman@yahoo.com.
She told gardaí that she had nothing to gain from the death of PJ Howard or his two sons.
She said she could not explain how PJ’s American Express credit card had been used to pay for flights to Ireland for Essam Eid and Teresa Engle but said that her purse had gone missing and the card number was in it.
The trial continues.