Michael Martin Dwyer
Michael Dwyer was an Irish security guard and paramilitary, shot dead in 2009 by the Bolivian Police Special Forces in the Las Americas Hotel, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia in disputed circumstances.
Background
Dwyer graduated with a BSc in Construction Management from the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in 2008. From February to late October he was a Team Leader for the security firm Integrated Risk Management Services at the controversial Shell gas pipeline site in Rossport, County Mayo, despite not holding the required Static Security license. It was there Dwyer reportedly met Tibor Révész and Előd Tóásó.Bolivia
In November 2008 he travelled to Bolivia from Madrid with three former I-RMS employees. According to La Prensa, the people who travelled with Dwyer on 17 November 2008 were Tibor Révész, Gábor Dudog and Ivan Pistovcak.In Santa Cruz he joined Eduardo Rózsa-Flores. The media has speculated that the link between Dwyer and Rózsa-Flores was former I-RMS employee Tibor Révész. Revesz is a founding member of the Szekler Legion, a paramilitary group that wants autonomy for Hungarians in Romania. An unsigned posting on the Szekler Legion website in October 2008 called for people to send their CVs to a stated email address if they believed they could assist an unnamed man – now believed to be Flores – in the protection of his "homeland", Santa Cruz. According to family and friends, Dwyer had traveled to Bolivia to attend a bodyguard course but no evidence for such a course exists.
Death in Bolivia
Following a bombing on 15 April at the home of Julio Cardinal Terrazas, the following day at around 4:00 a.m. thirty members of an elite police squad entered the hotel, cut the phone line, and demanded that night staff tell them where Flores and his entourage were staying. They were the only guests on the fourth floor, in a row of five rooms. Staff members on duty reported an explosion that shook the building, followed by 10 to 15 minutes of intense gunfire, "a rain of bullets" in the words of the night manager. Dwyer was killed, along with Árpád Magyarosi and Rózsa-Flores. The two members of the group not killed, Mario Tadic and Előd Tóásó, were taken prisoner, however their trial was troubled by the resignation of the prosecutor in charge, upon the emergence of evidence linking him to the planting of false evidence.According to a police report he had two guns and several rounds of ammunition in his room and gunpowder residue on his hands, however this conflicted with another police report that there had been no crossfire. Ballistics reports show that two shots were fired from his room.
Autopsies
An Irish state pathologist, Marie Cassidy, told the inquest into his death that Dwyer died from a single shot to the heart and not from six shots to the chest as asserted by the Bolivian autopsy. She said the post mortem on Dwyer in Bolivia was incomplete.The Bolivian autopsy by Antonio Torres Bulanza and Rafael Vargas Peña, of the Instituto de Investigaciones Forenses, showed Dwyer had six bullet entrance wounds with three exit wounds and the trajectory was from the back to the front, slightly from below to above, that his heart was intact and the cause of death was hypovolaemic shock from multiple thoracic injuries by bullets.