A Criminal gang is demanding £3,000 from Poleglass families, threatening  that if they don’t pay up “your drug-dealing children will be shot”.

A key member of the gang is a Twinbrook thug with such a heavy addiction to prescription drugs that he has been barred from every chemist in the West Belfast area.

The man has been to the fore in a number of incidents in the past fortnight when gangs claiming to be from “the republican movement” have targeted the families of alleged teenage drug dealers in the Poleglass estate.

In each incident, the gang has demanded “a minimum” of £3,000 from the families or their child will be shot. It is believed three homes have been visited by the gang in the past week. In one incident they left with just £30 – all the cash that was in the house at the time.

The leader of the gang, who’s from Poleglass, is the head of what’s known as ‘the Limerick Faction’ of the Continuity IRA in the Colin area. The Limerick faction is a splinter group of the CIRA that broke away following a fallout over accusations of criminal activity. The local leader has been involved in a number of robberies of businesses in the district in recent years.

The Twinbrook drug addict, meanwhile, is notorious in the Colin area for both his addiction and his criminality.  He has a long history of robbing chemists of prescription drugs and forging fake prescriptions and has also been involved in cash robberies of local businesses.

The pair have also been involved in previous extortion attempts in the Colin area.

“This is an old CIRA tactic reformed,” a well-placed source in the area told the Andersonstown News this week. “They’re trying to extort money from families that simply don’t have it and we have seen this before.

“They’re claiming to be from the republican movement, but everyone in the area knows exactly who they are and their shady criminal histories,” added our source.