A web of British collusion that rings Pat Finucane’s murder
Andersontown News, www.irelandclick.com
February 14, 2003
The 1989 murder of Pat Finucane opened up a Pandora’s box of British collusion with loyalist murder gangs in the North during the 1980s and 1990s.
Shot 14 times in front of his wife and children as he ate a Sunday meal in his Fortwilliam Drive home, his murder was instantly viewed with suspicion by nationalists.
A celebrated human-rights lawyer Pat Finucane won a number of high-profile legal battles with the British government.
But since his murder in 1989 it later emerged that the UDA gang which killed him was run almost exclusively by loyalists working for, and with, British military intelligence and the RUC’s Special Branch.
Almost every key member of the Shankill UDA gang who murdered Pat Finucane was working as an informer at the time.
The UDA quartermaster at the time and the man who supplied and stored the weapons used in the shooting was self-confessed informer William Stobie.
He later publicly stated that he had forewarned his handlers that a prominent nationalist was to be shot dead in North Belfast.
No action was ever taken by the RUC or British Army to stop or catch Pat Finucane’s killers.
Stobie also told Special Branch who returned the guns, where they were stored and who was involved in the murder.
He was shot dead by the UDA last year after he said he would help the Finucane family establish the extent of loyalist collusion with the British state.
In 1989 the Shankill UDA commander who gave the go-ahead to the killers to murder Pat Finucane was Tommy ‘Tucker’ Lyttle.
He too was a paid informer who regularly passed on information to his handlers.
Brian Nelson was the UDA intelligence officer who gathered the information for Pat Finucane’s killers.
He was working for the British Army’s Force Research Unit at the time and has stated that he kept them fully informed of the Finucane murder plot. Again no action was taken to stop the murder.
And one of the men who allegedly took part in the actual assassination has publicly admitted his role as an RUC informer.
Ken Barrett, who is now in hiding from the UDA, says a Special Branch officer suggested killing Finucane sometime before the murder took place.
Barrett, a seasoned UDA gunman, said the suggestion shocked him at the time.
He later became a full-time informer for Special Branch and two RUC detectives later claimed that Barrett confessed to his role in the killing.
Human Rights campaigners and Pat Finucane’s family say the revelations point to systematic and deliberate of collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries. They say the collusion, ordered and overseen by the British state, was structured to allow loyalists to kill Catholics in a campaign of terror.
And they argue the collusion goes to the heart of the British Government.
Campaigners believe the number of nationalists and republicans killed as a result of British collusion with the UDA and UVF could run into the hundreds.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s the Shankill UDA had by far the highest killing rate of all loyalist paramilitary groups.
It’s Commander, Intelligence officer, quartermaster, chief gunman and finance officer were all working for British military intelligence and Special Branch throughout that period.
No one has ever been found guilty of any charge associated with Pat Finucane’s murder.
Journalist:Staff Reporter