BAIBA Saulite had just finished putting her two children to bed and was smoking a cigarette at the front porch of her house in Holywell Square when she noticed the man.

As she chatted to a friend on the chilly November night, the 28-year-old Latvian woman found herself drawn to the figure walking towards her with a scarf and baseball hat covering his face.

She stood rooted to the spot as he turned into the driveway of the two-bedroomed townhouse and pulled a 9mm pistol from the pocket of his jacket. He quickly fired four shots into her upper body, the sound of the bullets masked by a silencer.

Her friend looked on in disbelief as Baiba fell to the ground. The man then calmly strolled to the end of the road and witnesses heard the screech of tyres as he was driven away.

The woman screamed as she looked at her friend lying on the concrete. She wasn't moving and it was clear that the assassin had succeeded in what he came to do.

Within minutes gardaA- descended on the quiet Swords housing estate, their sirens waking up five-year-old Ali and his three-year-old brother Mohamed who were asleep in an upstairs bedroom.

They walked down the stairs, confused at the commotion and were quickly prevented from seeing their beloved mum lying dead in a pool of blood.

In the three months since the murder that shocked the nation gardaA- have built up a clear picture of who had Baiba Saulite killed and why.

A person who was known to the Latvian woman decided that he wanted her dead after a long-running personal dispute.

He is involved in the criminal underworld and began plotting her murder at least six months before she was eventually killed last 19 November. He initially tried to engage two foreign men to carry out the assassination.

These individuals agreed at first but they eventually changed their minds after coming under sustained pressure because the man was unhappy with their slow progress.

This didn't put an end to the murder plot and the man thought that his friend - who is one of the most senior members of the notorious Dundon-McCarthy gang, based in Limerick - could help.

The Limerick criminal is currently in Mountjoy prison serving a lengthy sentence and was contacted and asked if he could arrange to have Baiba assassinated.

He agreed and spoke to a key player in the Finglas-based drugs gang led by Martin 'Marlo' Hyland until his murder last December.

The Hyland and Dundon-McCarthy gangs had formed an alliance two years previously and Baiba's murder was carried out by the Finglas gang as a favour to their Limerick counterparts.

The man who organised the killing did not pay any money to the Limerick criminals but agreed to work for them in the future if the need arose.

After accepting the contract to murder Baiba, the Dublin gang acted quickly. Within three days a petty criminal from Finglas had stolen a black BMW 520D from a house in Blackrock and passed it on to a member of Hyland's gang who fitted it with false registration plates so it could to be used as the getaway car without attracting garda attention.

Baiba was placed under surveillance for about 10 days before a man armed himself with a powerful pistol that had been imported into the country along with a large cocaine shipment. He was driven to Swords by a close associate who parked on the Feltrim Road and left the engine running. The gunman got out of the car but was back within two minutes having completed the job.

The car was subsequently found burnt out less than a mile from the murder scene.

Gardai do not definitively know who pulled the trigger, but have over half a dozen potential suspects. Two names are repeatedly being mentioned as the most likely to have been involved.

Both are in their early 40s and are also thought to have shot dead their boss Martin Hyland and innocent plumber Anthony Campbell last November.

One of the men is from Finglas with the other born in the northinner city. They are also the prime suspects in the murder of Paddy Harte, a father of four who was shot dead at his rented home on Edenmore Avenue, Raheny, last May.

These suspects have not been arrested but there have been seven arrests in the case so far and officers are expecting more over the coming months.

Most of those detained have been held on suspicion of withholding information about the murder while the man who is thought to have collected the stolen car from the young thief who stole it from Blackrock on 7 November has also been arrested.

Most of those arrested did not offer any information to gardaA- and all were released without charge.

Detectives say they have made steady progress and are confident of eventually charging the man who organised the killing.

GardaA- have informally interviewed him and he has denied any involvement, although detectives are 100% certain that he was responsible for planning the shooting.

Baiba Saulite came to Ireland with her boyfriend in 2000 hoping to make a new life. She was from Riga in Latvia and her family were very wealthy and regularly sent her over money.

Her relationship with her Latvian boyfriend soon ended and she almost immediately met and began dating a Lebanese man, Hassan Hassan, who had been in the country since the mid 1980s.

The couple married and moved to Mount Andrew Rise in Lucan where they had two sons. Baiba was a Christian while Hassan only told her he was a Muslim after they married. He then insisted that their children should be raised in the Muslim faith.

This left a significant strain on their relationship and the marriage subsequently ended. Baiba took the children to live with her in Swords and in December 2004 Hassan Hassan failed to return his sons after a scheduled three-day visit.

It eventually emerged that he had taken the children to Syria where they were cared for by his mother.

Baiba's life had been torn apart by the absence of her precious children. She initially didn't know if they had been taken out of the country and went on Liveline with Joe Duffy and spoke in harrowing terms about her loss, desperately appealing for people to look out for her sons.

Swords District Court ordered that Hassan Hassan should return the children to Ireland and he was jailed for contempt when he refused. He was charged with abduction in August 2005 and was granted bail on condition that he bring the children back from Syria.

He did this the following month and Ali and Mohamed went back to live with Baiba although Hassan Hassan had applied for custody.

Baiba took on a job cleaning offices two days a week to earn extra cash and enrolled Mohamed in Montessori while Ali started in junior infants at the Holy Family National School in Rivervalley in Swords.

The stress of her missing children eventually took its toll on the young mother and she suffered a nervous breakdown although she had recovered by the time of her death.

People say that her life was wholly dedicated to her children and she would do anything for them.

Hassan Hassan was jailed for two years for the abductions last December and told the court that Baiba told him she would take the children home to Latvia and he would never see them again.

The judge dismissed this and said Hassan had made clear attempts to intimidate his wife. Hassan Hassan is well known to gardaA- and was already serving a four-year sentence for handling stolen vehicles before he went on trial for abducting his children.

The 38-year old was a key member of a Lebanese crime syndicate involved in stealing top-of-the-range cars which were then exported to eastern Europe. He was detained in February 2004 after gardaA- swooped on a warehouse in Kilcullen, Co Kildare.

Detectives found nearly two dozen highpowered stolen cars which were ready for export. Some had already been packed up into containers ready to be taken to Dublin Port.

The haul was worth about Euro300,000 but gardaA- believe that over Euro3m worth of cars had been stolen and shipped out of the country before the ring was smashed.

Baiba Saulite had been receiving sinister threats in the months before her murder and just five weeks before she was killed her car was burnt out, which prompted her to move to the two-bedroom house in Holywell Square.

She told friends and neighbours that she was in fear of a man she named but did not mention this to gardaA- when they investigated the arson incident and at no stage did she inform the authorities that she was in fear of her life or had been in any way threatened.

Baiba was not the only person to be targeted however.

Her solicitor, John Hennessy, also received threats and petrol was poured through the front door of his home in February 2006 and set alight.

Nobody was injured in the incident and following the attack gardaA- increased security around the solicitor's home and workplace and also gave him extensive crime-prevention advice.

He was not subject to full-time armed protection prior to Baiba's murder although following the killing he was given round-the-clock protection.

This protection was prompted by gardaA- discovering that the same man that had organised Baiba's murder had also placed a contract on Hennessy. Specific attempts were made to have the solicitor killed.

A group of foreign criminals had him under ongoing surveillance for a number of months with a view to assassinating him although gardaA- doubt whether they would have actually carried out the murder.

Hennessy was certainly in fear of his life though and informed the Law Society of the threats he had received. He was targeted simply because of the legal work he did on Baiba's behalf.

Following Baiba's murder, Hennessy left Ireland and it is believed that he spent a number of weeks in Spain before travelling to Riga for his client's funeral. He has since returned to practising law and armed detectives from the Dublin North Division accompany him wherever he goes.

After his wife's murder, Hassan Hassan applied for early release to look after his children and attend Baiba's funeral. Following the failed court hearing he shouted to the waiting media that he was innocent of any involvement in Baiba's murder.

He said: "I, Hassan Hassan, am being blamed for my wife's murder. I am being framed. I did not kill my wife."

GardaA- have interviewed Hassan Hassan on three occasions but he has not been able to provide them with any leads that might identify her killer and says he is very upset about her death.

Ali and Mohammed are currently being cared for by the Health Service Executive and it is unclear where they will end up. Hassan Hassan's sister Rawaa Hassan wants to care for the boys until his release from prison but Baiba's family in Latvia are also seeking custody, and it will ultimately be a court that has the final say.

The cold-blooded murder of Baiba Saulite led to an outpouring of anger across the nation. That anger was primarily channelled through RTA radio's Liveline phone-in show which received thousands of calls from all over Ireland.

Many of the callers were friends of Baiba wanting to pay tribute to her, but many had never met the young Latvian and just wanted to express their revulsion at the horrific crime.

Joe Duffy says that he hadn't seen such public outrage since the assassination of journalist Veronica Guerin on 26 June 1996.

"I was presenting the Gay Byrne show on the day that Veronica was murdered and I thought I'd never see anything like the anger that came out after her brutal killing. When Baiba was murdered there were similar scenes. The reaction was just unbelievable and we received thousands of calls each day for over a week.

"The fact that she had been on the show a year previously talking about her kids being taken abroad really hit people. We had a 35minute interview with her and you could just hear the love she had for those kids in her voice. She was so genuine.

"The amount of people that turned out for the remembrance service spoke volumes.

Most didn't even know her but just wanted to show their solidarity. Her murder and the murder of young plumber Anthony Campbell came within such a short period of each other.

"A caller to Liveline got it right when he said that Anthony Campbell was every mother's son and Baiba was every child's mother. Whoever murdered Baiba knew that she had two young children asleep upstairs and knew her circumstances. Her case touched me and touched everybody in this country, " added Duffy.

The public outrage over Baiba's murder, coupled with the killing of 20-year-old Anthony Campbell just a month later, prompted Michael McDowell's sweeping legislative reform, announced last week, aimed at tackling gangland.

By tightening the bail laws and diluting the right to silence, the minister for justice hopes that in the future criminals will not be able to carry out murders with the confidence that they will not be caught.

GardaA- have described Baiba Saulite's murder as a "horrific crime" and Crimestoppers has offered a Euro10,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of her killer.