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He strangled the man who reported him, dumped the body and fled: the Andresj Krauze murder case

Latvian national Andresj Krauze killed Juris Buls after Buls refused to withdraw a Garda assault complaint, hid his body in a woodland drain and fled through Northern Ireland to England. Sent to Latvia for other offences and later returned to Ireland, Krauze was unanimously convicted of murder and given a mandatory life sentence.

Published 26 July 2026 · Remigration Ireland case ledger

MurderUnanimous jury verdict

LifeMandatory sentence

Four jurisdictionsIreland, Northern Ireland, England, Latvia

€127,000+Source-bounded Irish custody illustration

This was murder committed against a man who had used the Irish justice system to make a complaint. Krauze tried to buy the complaint's withdrawal, confronted the complainant when it remained active, killed him, concealed the body and crossed jurisdictions. It took years and international cooperation to put him before an Irish jury.

The complaint Krauze wanted withdrawn

Juris Buls, 30, was a Latvian factory worker who had lived in Ireland since 2005. Colleagues at Titan Plastics in Glenamaddy described him as reliable and hardworking. He made an assault complaint about fellow Latvian Andresj Krauze to Gardaí.

When Irish detectives interviewed Krauze in Riga in March 2012, he said he had paid Buls €600 to withdraw that complaint. When he learned it had not been withdrawn, Krauze went to Buls's home on 7 July 2011 to demand the money back.

Strangulation, concealment and flight

Krauze said a fight followed and admitted grabbing Buls by the neck and squeezing. Deputy State Pathologist Dr Michael Curtis found that Buls died by strangulation, in a manner more consistent with an arm lock or headlock than a rope or other ligature.

Krauze put Buls's body into the victim's car, drove to an isolated wooded area and dumped him in a water-filled drain. He then drove to Northern Ireland and continued to England.

Buls's girlfriend reported him missing on 9 July after he failed to attend his midnight factory shift. Acting on information, Gardaí searched Funshin Wood near Glenamaddy on 23 July. Sergeant Shane Birmingham noticed a boot protruding from the murky drain and found Buls's decomposed body.

England, a Latvian sentence, then return to Ireland

Once the body was identified, Krauze became an immediate suspect. The Irish Times reported that he had fled first to Northern Ireland and then England, where he was arrested and extradited to Latvia because he was wanted there for other offences.

Gardaí travelled to Riga to interview him in 2012 and applied to have him returned to Ireland after he completed a Latvian sentence. The published Irish reports do not identify those Latvian offences, so it would be wrong to label them violent, sexual, drug-related or otherwise. What is established is that the murder prosecution required a cross-border sequence through Britain and Latvia before Krauze was returned to face trial.

His brother's separate manslaughter conviction

Krauze's brother Sergejs had assisted him. In July 2013, Sergejs pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Buls and received ten years' imprisonment with the final three suspended, an operative term of seven years. The court heard that Sergejs helped his brother carry out the killing and flee.

The legal distinction matters: Sergejs was convicted of manslaughter. Andresj Krauze was later convicted of murder. This page does not collapse the two verdicts into one.

A unanimous murder verdict and mandatory life

Krauze pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court. The judge left the jury with three possible outcomes: murder, manslaughter or acquittal. The twelve jurors rejected his fight and self-defence account and unanimously convicted him of murder on 29 March 2017 after a three-week trial and almost five hours of deliberation.

On 26 April 2017, Ms Justice Margaret Heneghan imposed the mandatory life sentence and backdated it to 13 January 2016. No reliable later appeal judgment was located for this case file, so this page does not claim that an appeal was dismissed or that every appellate route was exhausted.

Case chronology

Before July 2011: Juris Buls makes an assault complaint about Krauze to Gardaí.
7–8 July 2011: Krauze confronts and strangles Buls, transports his body and dumps it in a woodland drain.
9 July 2011: Buls is reported missing after failing to appear for work.
23 July 2011: Gardaí recover his decomposed body at Funshin Wood.
After the killing: Krauze flees through Northern Ireland to England, is arrested and extradited to Latvia for other offences.
March 2012: Two Garda members interview Krauze in Riga.
July 2013: Sergejs Krauze receives a ten-year sentence with three years suspended for manslaughter.
13 January 2016: The later Irish life sentence is backdated to this custody-credit date.
29 March 2017: A Central Criminal Court jury unanimously convicts Andresj Krauze of murder.
26 April 2017: The mandatory life sentence is imposed.

A source-bounded minimum custody benchmark

The Irish Prison Service reported an average annual cost of €99,072 per available staffed prison space in 2024, excluding capital expenditure. Applied retrospectively as a flat benchmark from the sentence's backdated start of 13 January 2016 to sentencing on 26 April 2017, 469 days equals about 1.284 years, or approximately €127,000.

This is a minimum, source-bounded illustration—not an audited personal bill or the full cost of the case. It deliberately excludes any Irish imprisonment after sentencing because no newer explicit custody and location source was located. It also excludes time in Latvian custody, which is not an Irish prison-space cost, along with the Garda investigation, detectives' travel to Riga, interstate surrender or extradition work, prosecution, courts, legal aid, healthcare and the costs borne by Buls's family. The calculation retrospectively applies a later system-wide average and must not be represented as an exact historic invoice.

What the record does not establish

The reporting does not identify Krauze as an asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant or the subject of an Irish deportation order. Latvia is an EU member state. Nor does the record identify the offences behind his Latvian sentence or establish his current prison and custody status. The accountability story is strong without adding unsupported claims: retaliation against a Garda complainant, murder, concealment, flight, a multi-country enforcement process and a life sentence.