Lots of questions about what is going on here.

There has been a long term conflict between the Lyons family, who Monaghan and Lyons Jr, are affiliated with, and the Daniel family, both based in Glasgow. Over the last twenty years both sides have traded violent acts in a feud allegedly triggered by the theft of Daniel cocaine from a stash house in the early 2000s. This conflict has flared up periodically - it was at it's fiercest in the 2000s and perhaps peaked with the 2010 shooting of Kevin 'Gerbil' Carroll. Carroll was the Daniel family enforcer and had a string of violent acts against Lyons' members under his belt. Monaghan was charged with the crime but was cleared after doubt was cast over gun residue evidence presented at his trial. In 2017 Monaghan was shot and wounded while dropping his young child at school - after this incident he moved to Spain.

The death of the leader of the Daniel group, Jamie Daniel, of natural causes in 2016 seemed to preface a rise to power of the Lyons. In 2017 Lyons family members used car trackers to follow and attack Jamie's nephew and alleged new leader Steven 'Bonzo' Daniel as he drove home following a Rangers game - Bonzo suffered severe facial injuries but lived and five Lyons were given long jail terms for the attacks. In court Bonzo said that he didn't have any enemies and had no idea why someone would want to attack him - not sure anyone believed him.

In terms of severe violence between Daniel and Lyons, that appeared to be a last hurrah, although there are always lower level incidents. However, to understand the latest violence you have to look East from Glasgow to Edinburgh. Edinburgh's drug scene was dominated for many years by Mark Richardson and his associates/family. Richardson was busted for cocaine importation served a prison sentence around 2010 but was then picked up in Operation Escalade, which broke up what Scottish police called the most sophisticated organised crime group they had ever encountered. The group had military grade weapons, used sophisticated anti-survellience techniques and sourced drugs direct from South American cartels. They ended up police radar after abducting and brutally beating a dealer who owed them money, who subsequently testified against them. Richardson was picked up and recieved a ten year sentence for possession of a pistol. Richardson and the group broken up by Operation Escalade were associated with the Daniels but there were no members of the Daniels family directly involved.

Shortly after Richardson went to prison there began to be violent incidents in Edinburgh. A businessman, David MacMillan, was attacked by a gang with machetes in his home and shortly afterwards a local boxing gym owner Bradley Welsh was murdered outside his flat, shot in the back with a shotgun. The killer, Sean Orman, was picked up due to survelliance and the fact that an associate tipped off the police after Orman told him that he was being paid £10,000 to shoot Bradley Welsh. The fact that no warning was given to Welsh has lead his family to sue the police. During Orman's trial the name of George 'Dode' Baigrie came up multiple times. Baigrie is a traveller, a former boxer and allegedly the Lyons man in the East. Baigrie wasn't charged but his name was firmly now in public as the guy who had set the wheels in motion for these attacks. After Orman got life with a minimum of 28years, there was a spate of revenge attacks inEdinburgh with at least two members of Orman's crew being brutally attacked with machetes. One guy was chased down by balaclava wearing assailants and nearly decapitated outside a Nandos in a shopping centre. Baigrie re-emerged when he was charged with stabbing Mark Richardson's brother Dale - a few months ago he was found guilty of this and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

So this is where we were a few months ago - a brewing conflict in Edinburgh tangentially related to the decades long feud in Glasgow. The spark that has lit this up appears to be a drug deal gone wrong with a new player - Ross McGill. McGill is a former football Ultra and was involved in running the Rangers FC Ultras the Union Bears. Since moving on from that he has become an organised crime figure and relocated to Dubai where has orchestrated shipments of cocaine to Edinburgh, a big drug market. Earlier this year it appears that some members of Mark Richardson's crew arranged a drug shipment from McGill worth £500,000 but paid in counterfeit money. When this was discovered, a string of firebombings and attacks have started, first in Edinburgh where several businesses with links to Richardson (his girlfriends beauty salon, his father-in-laws works yard) were set on fire and a number of houses of those seen as close to him were either firebombed or had windows shot out. It's alleged that the architect of the scam was tracked down to Thailand and slashed across the face. The attacks escalated, moving to Glasgow and targeting members of the Daniel family - Bonzo's house was firebombed and Kevin 'The Gerbil' Carrol's widow was also targeted with a firebombing. A group calling itslef Tamo Junta began issuing statements on social media while issuing videos of their attacks warning anyone associated with Richardson and the Daniels to leave Scotland. It also began to be rumoured that the Lyons family had teamed up with McGill against their common enemy. The attacks began to become more serious - David MacMillan was again attacked with a machete at his house and workers at a garage run by a Daniel family member in Glasgow area were also attacked with machetes. Rumours last week suggested that the Lyons were stepping back and that there was a truce incoming but firebombings continued until the very night of the shooting of Monaghan and Lyons Jr.

That brings us to the events in Spain. If this shooting is linked to the feud then it's a massive escalation in the feud, the first murders since the current violence began and an order of magnitude more serious than what has been seen so far in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Most of this has been stabbings and petrol bombs, for someone to walk into a bar and shoot dead two of the senior Lyons guys on their own turf is extremely serious. Doing something like this would require serious logistics, you also need to have serious, heavy people willing to do it. A lot of the violence in Scotland has been outsourced to youths, teenagers in some cases. Clearly whoever did this is a lot more serious than that. Of course, there's the possibility it has nothing to do with the current feud - both Monaghan and Lyons Jr are high level in a drug dealing gang, they could have fallen out with another group of people entirely. There have been several shootings in the Costa del Sol in recent weeks of British criminals, although that's not exactly unheard of in that part of the world. The Lyons are associated with the Kinahan cartel and given the way things are going for them at the moment this could be associated with the fallout from that organisation being pushed.

So now we wait, what will the next move be. The fear is that the Lyons/McGill group retaliate with more extreme violence and that the tit-for-tat pattern continues with worsening severity. The best thing that can be hoped is that things are ended before any more death and before any other innocents are hurt - in the current violence at child and old woman were assaulted in one attack and a couple of years ago there was a case of mistaken identity which lead to an Edinburgh man to be attacked with a machete and nearly lose a hand. It's also worth stating that Scotland has one of the highest levels of drug related death in the world. The groups we are talking about are the ones who are importing and in some cases manufacturing these drugs that kill hundreds of Scottish people each year.