DUBLIN, June 8 (Xinhua) -- The funeral for a victim of a recent boxing club shooting in Ireland was held in the country's eastern coastal county of Wicklow on Friday morning, local media reported.
The victim was a 50-year-old man named Bobby Messett who was killed Tuesday morning inside a boxing club in Bray, a small town in Wicklow, some 20 km from the Irish capital.
The shooting incident also left two other men seriously injured. One of the injured is the owner of the boxing club Pete Taylor, who is the father of the former Olympic women's lightweight boxing champion Katie Taylor.
At about 7:00 a.m. local time on Tuesday, a masked man walked into Bray Boxing Club and fired a number of shots before fleeing the scene in a silver Volkswagen Caddy van with a Northern Ireland registration plate.
The van was later found abandoned in Dublin. Eyewitnesses told police they saw a man exiting the van and leaving on a bicycle.
So far no clues have been found about the whereabouts of the gunman, said police.
Earlier local media reports suggested that the target of the attack could be 57-year-old Pete Taylor, and could be related to personal enmities.
On Thursday night, Katie Taylor issued a statement in which she said she had had little contact with her father in the last three years and no contact or association whatsoever with Bray Boxing Club since 2015.
"I have been appalled by the misuse of my name and image during the reporting of this incident in the media coverage. It has been reckless and irresponsible, and a deliberate attempt to inappropriately leverage my name to sell a story," she said.
