NI: Political Killings in Northern Ireland
01 May 1994
On 9 February, Amnesty International published its latest report on the UK, entitled Political Killings in Northern Ireland. It was immediately dismissed by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, the RUC and Ulster Unionist politicians. At the same time, an official United States report was being presented to President Clinton which, like the Amnesty report, is highly critical of the British Army and RUC.
Ken Maginnis MP, who speaks for the Ulster Unionist Party on security issues, said that "Amnesty has clearly set out to discredit the security service and by doing so discredits itself". Amnesty's "glaring disregard for the main cause of human rights abuse, which is carried out by terrorists, is indicative of a lack of concern for the victims . . . there is no place for this self-appointed jury". Twelve pages of the report, however, deal with killings and human rights abuses by "armed political groups", Republican and Loyalist.
Referring to police officers and soldiers, and allegations of collusion with Loyalist groups, Deputy Chief Constable, Blair Wallace, attacked the Amnesty report by saying, "it is unjust and insulting to these brave men and women to infer that they are anything other than even-handed." He repeated the now standard rejoinder: more loyalists than republicans were charged with offences last year - "do these facts suggest collusion?" (The Chief Constable's Annual Report for 1992 states, "Some 405 persons - 214 republican and 191 loyalist - were charged with terrorist-type offences".)
Collusion is at the centre of the report. It charts the origins of the Stevens inquiry which lay in UDA/UFF claims that their killing of Loughlin Maginn in August 1989 was not sectarian but based on information from RUC files that he was an IRA member. Within weeks, photocopies of intelligence files on over 250 suspects had been leaked to the media and pasted on Belfast street walls - "these were security force documents and included pictures, names, addresses, car registration numbers and sometimes other details about Republican suspects' movements." There was a regular flow of such documents to Loyalist groups, it was claimed.
The Stevens inquiry
The Stevens inquiry, the report states: "failed to identify members of the security forces involved in passing on information to Loyalist armed groups. It also clearly failed to enjoy the full cooperation of the British Army". This was evident in the way military intelligence held on to hundreds of documents given to them for safekeeping by their agent, Brian Nelson. Nelson was highly placed within the UDA and was the only person to be charged with conspiracy to murder as a result of the Stevens inquiry. Amnesty concludes that:
"the Stevens inquiry would have been very important if its scope had been wide enough to look at the issue of collusion as a whole... It did not look at evidence that collusion between members of the security forces and Loyalist armed groups had been going on for many years, or at the overall pattern as it related to both targeted and random killings of Catholics. It did not examine the authorities record during this time in bringing criminal proceedings against security personnel in this regard, or the official response to evidence of partiality and discriminatory treatment."
A major opportunity for investigating collusion was presented by the Nelson case. But just before the trial, the most serious charges against him, including two murder charges, were dropped; he then pleaded guilty to the remaining charges. This led to a trial in which "only fragments of the truth bearing on allegations of collusion emerged". Nevertheless, it was revealed that military intelligence had taken the entire set of UDA files into its temporary possession (for the purpose of updating and streamlining them), that "the army and the RUC were aware of the flow of their own intelligence reports to the UDA, and their use in target