Qayyum Balogun was stabbed to death in Dublin’s south inner city after being chased from Grafton Street to Clarendon Street just before 3am on Monday. The 21-year-old gig promoter, who had long settled in Ireland, ran from the busy city centre street on to Johnson’s Court before turning on to Clarendon Street, where he was caught and wounded several times.

He collapsed there and could not be revived. Gardaí and paramedics attended Balogun on Clarendon Street before he was taken to St James’s Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. The killing has turned a late-night stretch of one of Dublin’s busiest districts into the focus of a homicide probe that is now moving fast because officers are trying to piece together what happened while the trail is still fresh.

Balogun had been at an event on Grafton Street on Sunday night into the early hours of Monday morning, and gardaí believe the incident began after that gathering. Pearse Street gardaí are examining whether the attack was part of a wider dispute between rival groups after a gig in the south inner city, with two large groups believed to have been in the area at the time. The precise sequence of events has not yet been fully established, but the case is already being treated as more than a single street attack.

That uncertainty is now central to the investigation. Grafton Street and the surrounding lanes are heavily covered by CCTV, and retailers in the area said gardaí had requested footage from locations along Grafton Street, Clarendon Street and Coppinger Row, with particular interest near the Powerscourt Shopping Centre. Officers from Pearse Street station are also seeking witnesses, and they have asked anyone with CCTV or dashcam footage to come forward as detectives try to recover the route, the timings and the people involved.

The State Pathologist has been informed and a postmortem will be arranged. A spokesperson for Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan said he had been briefed on the killing and had extended condolences to Balogun’s family. What happens next is not a mystery of direction but of detail: if the footage and witness accounts line up, investigators may be able to show who pursued him, who else was involved and what sparked the violence in the first place.