Northern Ireland: JSG/FRU leaves Ireland for Iraq
01 March 2005
It has been reported that the Joint Support Group (JSG), the successor of the Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU) - which was a key element of the government's counter terrorist strategy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, who gave information to loyalist paramilitary death squads to assassinate republican activists and civilians alike - is to be pulled out of Northern Ireland and posted to other operations overseas.
According to
The Times newspaper the Northern Ireland Secretary, Paul Murphy, announced in February that the JSG would be one of a number of units to leave the six-county statelet as part of a "normalisation" process. He added that MI5, which worked directly with the FRU when it was most active during the 1980s, will take over as the prime source for intelligence by 2007.
The FRU, which was led by Brigadier Gordon Kerr, remains at the centre of continuing investigations by Sir John Stevens into allegations that its members colluded with RUC Special Branch officers and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) paramilitaries to kill a number of prominent republicans during the 1980s. Steven's inquiries have played a key role in staunching information about the FRU from reaching the public domain. He has been reluctant to discuss the unit, neutrally describing it as "the Army's agent handling unit in Northern Ireland". The government has also threatened legal action against newspapers who report on the FRU. The
Sunday Herald has faced legal action and
The Times was threatened with gagging orders to prevent from reporting disclosures.
The Cory report, which investigated allegations of collusion by members of the security forces in the deaths of lawyers of Patrick Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, civilian Robert Hamill as well as that of loyalist paramilitary leader Billy Wright, found that the army had turned a blind eye to the FRU’s activities in an act that could be characterised as collusive. In fact, as the case of Brian Nelson - a UDA intelligence officer and one of the FRU's top agents - demonstrated, it was implicated in at least five cases of conspiracy to murder. Recently the Irish-language television channel, TG4 has linked the FRU to the UDA/UFF hit squad that murdered Donegal Sinn Fein councillor, Eddie Fullerton, at his Buncrana home in 1991. Sinn Fein spokesman, Aengus O Snodaigh TD, believed there was "strong evidence of British Security force collusion in the murder."