Focus on victims of a 30-year dirty war


Angelique Crisafis
Friday April 2, 2004
The Guardian

Pat Finucane
Killed February 12 1989

On February 12 1989, the solicitor Pat Finucane sat down to dinner at his Belfast home with his wife, Geraldine, and their three children. At 7.25pm a masked gunman from the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association broke down the front door. Fourteen shots were fired into Finucane's head, neck and torso, killing him instantly.

Judge Cory said there was documentary proof that MI5, the army and Special Branch knew about a plot to kill Finucane before his murder. They failed to act to save him because they preferred to protect their loyalist paramilitary informers.

Finucane, 39, had appeared in high-profile legal cases, defending alleged IRA or Provisional IRA members, and had represented the hunger striker Bobby Sands. He also acted for protestants. Judge Cory said Finucane was a "law-abiding citizen" who was killed because he was a solicitor.

A few weeks before Finucane was murdered, the Home Office minister Douglas Hogg stated in parliament: "Some lawyers are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA." Judge Cory said statements made by the ex-chief constable of the RUC had belittled Finucane's integrity and that the police tended "to identify a solicitor with his clients". The RUC kept a file on Finucane and his alleged Republican background, and recorded his "legitimate activities" as a lawyer and supporter of human rights.

Judge Cory said the police investigation into his murder was thwarted by Special Branch, which was "controlling the situation" and withheld vital information. Two agents were being protected: Brian Nelson, a key player in the UDA and an informer for the army's crack intelligence squad, the Force Research Unit, and William Stobie, a former soldier in the British army and a UDA quartermaster who turned Special Branch informer. Both are now dead.

Nelson had compiled detailed index cards - known as "personality cards" - on intended UDA victims, including Finucane. Another loyalist paramilitary had told him that Finucane was "someone really big... the brains behind the provisional IRA". Judge Cory said a public inquiry would determine how much his handlers knew about the targeting of the lawyer.

Stobie claimed he twice informed Special Branch about the threats to Finucane, but they did nothing. MI5 was first told about threats in 1981, but took no action on the "very real and imminent" threat because it would compromise its agent. Just two months before the murder, security services were told Finucane was a "shoot to kill" target but nothing was done.

Judge Cory said a public inquiry should investigate whether British security forces gave "tacit encouragement or even active facilitation" of UDA operations and targeting of victims that led to murder. He described a "cumulative picture" of possible army, MI5 and Special Branch collusion. Nelson - whom the army knew was involved in protection rackets and planning murders - was given information by his handlers that may have helped in UDA murders.

Judge Cory also raised the question of security of army weapons. One member of the Ulster Defence Regiment - "a man all too fond of alcohol, a loner" - had stolen weapons and sold them to loyalist paramilitaries. They were later used in Finucane's murder. One of the murder weapons was a 99m Browning pistol. Stobie told Special Branch that he had given the UDA paramilitary a 99m Browning pistol and the target was almost certainly Finucane. He later told one journalist he couldn't sleep a wink that night and that he was sure the murder would be foiled. He "could not believe it" when he heard Finucane was dead.

Special Branch knew that, three days after the murder, Stobie had been ordered to pick up and hide a 99m Browning pistol. Judge Cory found no indication that they took steps to recover the weapon. The police were said to have a "selective bias" in which they perceived threats by Republican terrorist groups to be more dangerous and deserving of attention than those made by loyalist terrorist groups.

Rosemary Nelson
Killed March 15 1999

The murder of the human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson is inextricably linked to the violent standoffs which came to be known as Drumcree - the right or otherwise of thousands of Orangemen to march down the nationalist Garvaghy Road in Portadown, County Armagh, in the marching season.

Nelson, 40, a mother of three, was the first female solicitor to open a practice in nearby Lurgan, and was proud of her record of serving clients from both sides of the community.

But in the few years before her death she became a focus of Loyalist fury by acting for Catholic Garvaghy Road residents who were seeking to reroute the marches. She also appeared to have made enemies in the local RUC by representing a Republican acquitted of killing two colleagues, and by agreeing to act for Hamill's family, who claimed that officers in the town stood idly by while he was kicked to death by a Protestant mob after leaving a dance.

Several other clients told her that during police interrogations officers repeatedly made "demeaning" remarks about her childhood facial scarring, calling her a "terrorist with a deformed face" . A number, it was alleged, also hinted darkly that her days were numbered.

One allegedly said, "Tell Rosemary that she's going to die too." Another: "She won't be here that long, she'll be dead."

Nelson made official complaints about the comments, and later alleged that she was directly threatened and assaulted by the police during a disturbance on the Garvaghy Road.

By then she had also been the victim of anonymous threatening calls to her home and office, had been labelled a "bomber" in loyalist leaflets, and nine months before her death had received a death threat. Despite pleas by various legal and human rights groups to the RUC and the Northern Ireland Office for protection, none was forthcoming.

It is another indication of how tight the mesh of murder can be in Northern Ireland that the car bomb that killed her was planted by the Loyalist Volunteer Force, the murder of whose former leader Billy Wright in the Maze prison has also been investigated by Judge Cory.

The judge said a neighbour who had tried to console Nelson as she waited, still conscious, for the ambulance claimed that as he drove away his own car a soldier who stopped him taunted him with, "Jesus, the one we put underneath that car has fell [sic] off."

The judge criticised the then RUC chief constable Ronnie Flanagan for identifying lawyers with the causes of their clients. "This together with the demeaning remarks alleged to have been made about Rosemary Nelson by other RUC officers, could be taken as an indication that neither her complaints nor her protection would be taken seriously by the RUC and as well may have encouraged others to attack her."

Robert Hamill
Killed April 27 1997

Robert Hamill's only crime was going for a drink with his family in Portadown at a time when the town was at its most dangerously divided. Even at that, it was still weeks away from the marching season, and the terror that gripped the town's Catholic community after the stand-off began over the Orange Order demonstration at Drumcree.

Hamill, 25, was a builder with two sons, Shane, who was six, and Ryan, aged four. His fiancée was expecting their third child.

Saturday-night sectarian brawling was common in Portadown. Locals knew how to sidestep trouble as the pubs and clubs emptied out. But that night there had been a full-blown riot at the corner of Thomas Street and Market Street.

As Hamill left St Patrick's Hall with his cousins and one of their wives, he unwittingly walked into the aftermath of a confrontation involving 10 or 12 Catholics and about 40 Protestants. A police Land Rover was parked nearby.

Suddenly, according to two survivors, a mob "appeared out of nowhere", having broken away from the main phalanx of Protestant rioters, and attacked Hamill and his cousin Gregory Girvan. Both were beaten unconscious, but some of the 20 or 30 gathered around Hamill continued to kick him in the head, crying "Kill the Fenian bastard".

Siobhan Girvan tried to protect her cousin, then ran to the police Land Rover and banged on the sides for help. There was no response. Only after an ambulance arrived did officers leave the vehicle, Hamill's family claimed. Other eyewitnesses confirmed that police did not try to intervene during the 10-minute attack. One man in a Rangers scarf, seen kicking Hamill, was taken to the Land Rover and later allowed out.

A constable in the Land Rover that night, who knew one of the alleged assailants from a local club, did not mention him in any of his statements for five months and is alleged to have telephoned the suspect's family and warned them to get rid of his clothes.

Judge Cory said that if this was established, "it would constitute the most flagrant collusion... If the shouts and screams could be heard and were ignored, that could constitute an act of collusion that encouraged the rioters."

Billy Wright
Killed December 27 1997

Billy Wright, 37, known as King Rat, was one of the most enigmatic and notorious loyalist paramilitary leaders of the Troubles. The founder of the renegade Loyalist Volunteer Force, implicated in the random sectarian murder of several Catholics, he came to prominence during the Drumcree crisis.

In 1997, having got himself embroiled in a feud with his old comrades in the Ulster Volunteer Force, he asked the courts to revoke his bail on a charge of making threats to kill so he could be committed to the safety of jail.

But Judge Cory found that "prison was anything but a safe haven for Billy Wright". Two days after Christmas 1997 Billy Wright was brought out of his H-block in the Maze prison and escorted to a minibus that was to take him and an LVF comrade to see their Saturday morning visitors. Two prisoners housed in the INLA wing of the same block escaped over a roof and shot him dead with a pistol smuggled into the jail, supposedly the most secure in western Europe.

Judge Cory said members of the INLA, a dissident Republican group, were the most bitter of Wright's many enemies. He questioned the wisdom of housing the INLA and LVF in the same block and found that the authorities had turned "a blind eye" to the warnings of prison officers that this would lead to trouble. Despite intelligence warnings, "no steps were taken to avert what had become a clearly foreseeable risk of violence".

The prison authorities were aware that Wright had been the target of a murder attempt by the INLA in Maghaberry prison in the spring of the same year. "They therefore knew that they would be putting Billy Wright close to those who they knew had attempted to kill him and who they knew had expressed a continuing intention to kill him." Christopher "Crip" McWilliams, who led the attack on Wright, had been transferred to the Maze a few days after Wright. Just before the transfer he had orchestrated a hostage-taking incident at Maghaberry designed to culminate in an assassination attempt on Wright.