Cork machete murder: Gardaí send file to DPP on man killed in front of wife and children

Irish Times

14-05-2025

Gardaí
in
Cork
have forwarded a file to the DPP on the murder of a father (35) of two who was killed in a machete attack in front of his wife and young children at their home in Ballincollig almost seven years ago.
Polish national Mikolaj Wilk, who was known as Nick and worked as a landscape gardener, was attacked by up to five masked men armed with machetes when they burst into his home, the Bridge House, at Maglin near Ballincollig at around 3am on June 10th, 2018.
Mr Wilk was repeatedly hacked in front of his wife, Elzbieta, who sustained serious slash injuries to her face, neck and her hands as she sought to protect her husband from his attackers, and she underwent surgery to try to save a number of fingers.
The couple's two children, who were both under six years of age at the time, were uninjured in the incident, which gardaí described as one of the worst they had encountered in Cork.
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A woman in her 30s who was renting a room from the Wilks, managed to flee through a window at the rear of the house and ran to a nearby house to raise the alarm. Gardaí responded, arriving to the scene where they found Mr Wilk in a critical condition.
Gardaí and HSE paramedics, who arrived soon after, worked to stabilise Mr Wilk's condition before he was taken by ambulance to Cork University Hospital, where despite extensive injuries, he survived for two hours before dying.
Now almost seven years after what gardaí described as 'a complex investigation with an international aspect', which involved examining more than 1,000 hours of CCTV footage and detailed analysis of phone records, detectives have forwarded a file running to over 3,000 pages to the DPP.
The file also includes memos of interviews with six suspects, all in their 30s – two Poles and a Latvian, who were arrested at addresses in Ballincollig and Togher in January 2019; a Latvian who was arrested in Blackpool; and an Irish man and woman who were arrested in Mayfield in April 2019.
All six were arrested and brought to various Garda stations around Cork City including Togher, Gurranebraher and the Bridewell where they were all detained under Section 50 of the Criminal Justice Act and questioned at length before they were all released without charge.
The file also includes the results of a postmortem by Assistant State Pathologist Dr Margot Bolster that found Mr Wilk died from shock and haemorrhage due to multiple blows from sharp weapons in association with a traumatic brain injury.
Mr Wilk's inquest first opened before Cork City Coroner Philip Comyn in November 2018 when medical evidence on the cause of Mr Wilk's death was heard, but gardaí have successfully sought a number of adjournments since then to allow for the criminal investigation to proceed.
Gardaí have remained tight-lipped about their investigation over the past six years and 11 months, but it is understood their focus has been on an Eastern European criminal gang whom they believed carried out the attack with logistics support from people in Cork.
Investigators have kept Mr Wilk's widow, Elzbieta, informed of the latest developments – she returned to Poland with her children later in June 2018, settling down in her home village some 60km from Poznan where she and Mr Wilk were childhood sweethearts.