[A-List] UK state: Northern Ireland blowback

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Collusion 'at heart' of Finucane killing

Shadowy army unit accused as web of secrecy leaves solicitor's murder
unsolved 13 years on

Rosie Cowan and Nick Hopkins
Friday June 14, 2002
The Guardian

Defence lawyer Pat Finucane was a thorn in the British establishment's
side when alive, and the huge controversy surrounding his murder means
he remains so, 13 years after his death.

Almost from the moment he died, his family was convinced that police
officers and British soldiers colluded with the loyalist paramilitaries
who carried out the shooting, in a conspiracy they suspect went to the
heart of the corridors of power.

At the core of the case are accusations about the RUC special branch and
the shadowy army force research unit, known as FRU, which it is claimed
at best turned a blind eye to loyalist terrorism and at worst, actively
encouraged the targeting of certain people.

On February 12 1989, the solicitor, his wife, Geraldine, and their three
children, were eating dinner in their north Belfast home when members of
Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters loyalist paramilitary
group broke down the front door with sledgehammers.

Two masked gunmen fired a total of 14 shots from a .38 revolver and a
9mm Browning automatic pistol, all of which hit Finucane. One bullet
ricocheted off Geraldine's foot. The killers made their getaway in a
stolen taxi, later abandoned on Woodvale Road.

The UDA/UFF said they killed the 38-year-old solicitor because he was a
high-ranking officer in the IRA, but police at his inquest said they had
no evidence to support that.

Several members of his family had strong republican links and he
represented republicans in many high profile cases, but he had also
acted for loyalists.

His brother, John, an IRA man, was killed on active service in a car
crash in the Falls Road, Belfast, in 1972. Another brother successfully
contested attempts to extradite him to Northern Ireland from the Irish
Republic, while a third brother was the fiance of Mairead Farrell, one
of the IRA trio shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988.

Pat Finucane's best-known client was the IRA hunger striker, Bobby
Sands. He also represented other IRA and INLA hunger strikers who died
during the 1981 Maze prison protest, and the widow of Gervaise McKerr,
one of three men shot dead by the RUC in a so-called "shoot-to-kill"
incident in 1982.

Several UDA/UFF members were questioned at length in the weeks after
Finucane's murder. No charges were brought, but concerns were
multiplying in the family's minds. Three weeks before the shooting,
Douglas Hogg, then a junior Home Office minister, had told the House of
Commons that certain solicitors in Northern Ireland were unduly
sympathetic to the IRA.

Indirect threats had been relayed to the solicitor through clients whom
police had interrogated at the Castlereagh holding centre. An RUC
officer was once reported to have told a client: "You will not be having
Mr Finucane as a solicitor much longer."

Moreover, there were persistent allegations that detectives suggested
the lawyer as a possible target to loyalists they were questioning in
connection with terrorist offences. And on the night of the murder, the
family said police roadblocks close to their home were lifted before the
attack.

In 1992, UDA/army double agent Brian Nelson told a BBC Panorama
programme that the UDA had asked him to compile a dossier on Finucane's
movements. Nelson, who was jailed for 10 years for other terrorist
offences but never charged in connection with Finucane, said he told his
army handlers about the matter.

Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, who had
previously investigated other cases of alleged security force collusion
with loyalists, started a second inquiry. The finger was pointed at FRU
when his offices in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, were mysteriously gutted
by fire.

Throughout the 1990s, Amnesty International, the New York-based Lawyers
Committee on Human Rights, and the Committee for the Administration of
Justice were among the groups campaigning for an independent inquiry.

In 1998, Param Cumaraswamy, a United Nations Human Rights Commission
expert on the independence of judges and lawyers, added his voice to
inquiry lobby, but the RUC slammed his report as short of objectivity,
accuracy and fairness.

Meanwhile, another former undercover soldier, known by the pseudonym
Martin Ingram, broke ranks to claim that both FRU and special branch
knew loyalists had tried to target Finucane on two previous occasions
but he was not warned his life was in danger. Ingram also alleged that
Tommy "Tucker" Little, head of the UDA brigade behind Finucane's murder,
was a special branch informer.

Then in 1999, on its third inquiry, the Stevens team arrested a man who
had been questioned about the murder in 1990. William Stobie, a
self-confessed former UDA quartermaster and RUC informant, had told two
journalists that he supplied the weapons for the Finucane murder without
knowing who was to be killed.

Stobie insisted he told his RUC handlers almost a week before the murder
that his UDA commander had asked him to get the guns for a "job" on a
"top Provie", but he was amazed when police did nothing, either then or
just before the killing, when he alerted them again, or later when he
told them the principle murder weapon, a Browning pistol, had been moved
from its hiding place.

Stobie claimed that special branch tried to set him up by tampering with
UDA guns so he would be blamed and, on another occasion, framed him by
planting guns in his home.

But during his trial for arms possession in 1990, he instructed his
solicitor to tell the crown lawyer privately that he would tell all he
knew about the Finucane case if he was found guilty. Minutes later, a
police witness made an elementary mistake by referring to previous
convictions and the judge declared a mistrial.

Mentally unfit

One of the two journalists to whom Stobie told his story was Ed Moloney,
of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, who refused to hand over his notes
to police. The other, Neil Mulholland, formerly with Belfast paper,
Sunday Life, made a statement to the Stevens team. However, the case
against Stobie collapsed in December 2001 when Mulholland was deemed
mentally unfit to take the witness stand.

Less than a fortnight later, Stobie was shot dead outside his north
Belfast flat, most probably by members of the UDA, exacting their final
retribution for his disloyalty to their organisation.

Alan Simpson, the retired detective originally in charge of the Finucane
case, was never told by his special branch colleagues that Stobie was an
informer and now sees his situation as trying to catch the killers while
having one hand tied behind his back.

Just after Stobie's murder, Ken Barrett, another UDA member alleged to
be one of the gunmen who shot Finucane, and whom special branch also
later recruited as an informer for a short time, fled to England,
fearing he could be next.

Boasted

Another retired CID detective, Johnston "Jonty" Brown, told Ulster
Television that Barrett had boasted about the murder in a
surreptitiously taped conversation with him and a CID colleague in
October 1991, during which a special branch officer was also present.

Brown said Barrett described details of the murder scene that only
someone very close to the killing could have known, such as mockingly
calling the victim "Fork Finucane" because he died holding a fork in his
hand. But the tape which special branch eventually gave the Stevens
inquiry team was recorded a week later and made no mention of the
murder.

Barrett is believed to have given the Stevens team significant details
of the murder, while under their protection in England. Another leading
UDA member, William "Mo" Courtney, a close friend of Shankill UFF leader
Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair, was arrested on suspicion of killing Finucane,
but was freed without charge.

And in yet another twist, it recently emerged that police had recovered
one of the murder weapons, the Browning pistol, originally stolen from
an army barracks, but had amazingly given it back to the army, who
replaced the barrel and slide, thus removing vital evidence in a case
where the army itself is at the heart of the controversy.

To date, no one has been brought to justice in connection with the
murder of Pat Finucane.

The Stevens team have tried to unravel the many seemingly inexplicable
contradictions in the lead-up to the murder, the killing itself and its
aftermath, and the government has now appointed an international judge,
Peter Cory, from Canada, to re-examine the killing and five other murder
inquiries where security force collusion is suspected.

But the Finucane family see both as delaying, cover-up tactics, and
continue to battle for an independent, public inquiry as the only path
to the truth in one of the most contentious and far-reaching cases of
the past 30 years in Northern Ireland.

-----

Shadowy unit's infiltration role

Nick Hopkins and Rosie Cowan
Friday June 14, 2002
The Guardian

The force research unit was deployed in Northern Ireland in 1980 and
given the job of recruiting and handling double agents who could
infiltrate loyalist and republican terror groups.

With a complement of about 100 soldiers, the FRU was one of three
army-sponsored undercover intelligence squads in the province at the
time.

The others were 14 Company, which specialised in covert surveillance,
and 22 Squadron SAS, which undertook "executive actions".

"That means they killed people," said an army source.

FRU was divided into detachments - north, south, east and west.
Headquarters FRU dealt only with material supplied by a republican
double agent, known only by the nickname Stakeknife.

Gordon Kerr, then a colonel, was in charge of the FRU during the late
1980s and early 90s. It was during his time in command that FRU achieved
one of its greatest successes - the infiltration of the loyalist
paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, using an agent, Brian Nelson.

Nelson was the UDA's senior intelligence officer at the time that
Finucane, who had represented republicans, was murdered.

It is thought that Nelson was one of up to 20 Northern Ireland-born
soldiers who were asked by the army to become agents inside terrorist
groups.

Kerr, who is in his 50s, must have impressed the MoD during his time in
the FRU. Now a brigadier and the British military attache in Beijing, he
was awarded a QCVS (Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service) in 1996
for his gallant and distinguished service.

Sensitivity about the FRU is acute in the MoD, which has sought
injunctions on newspapers that have attempted to reveal details of its
operations.

The MoD is also extremely nervous about what the Stevens report will
reveal, and has hired a firm of top lawyers to represent Kerr.

FRU still works in Northern Ireland, though it has changed its name to
the joint services group.