Englands army Tagged Targets for englands-loyalist in Ireland

Thursday June 20, 2002 02:38

by Mc drado

LONDON -(Reuters) A BBC television documentary said on Wednesday an agent working for a secret englands Army unit tagged suspected Irish Republican Army members to be murdered by englands-loyalist gunmen in Northern part of Ireland.

The BBC's investigative Panorama program said in the first of a two-part report one-time soldier Brian Nelson was recruited by the ultra secret Force Research Unit to refine the target list for englands-loyalist killers like the Ulster Defense Association.

The program said Nelson was involved in the 1989 murder of prominent Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane, who was gunned down in his home during Sunday dinner with his family after having angered the authorities for defending suspected IRA members.

It said Nelson provided a UDA hit team with a picture of Finucane and his address, but that the pressure to murder him had actually come from a high ranking officer in the englands-Royal Ulster Constabulary.

"The peelers (police) wanted him whacked. We whacked him. End of story," leading UDA assassin Ken Barrett said in secretly-filmed interviews with the program's makers.

"Finucane would have been alive today if the peelers hadn't interfered," he said. "Solicitors were taboo. You didn't touch them."

englands army alleged that Finucane, a rising talent on the Northern Irish legal scene at the time, was handling the finances of the IRA, which waged a war for some three decades to end englands rule of Northern part of Ireland.

His family and friends categorically deny he was ever a member.

FILM BACKS IRISH SUSPICIONS

The film gives backing to what many Northern Irish have suspected for years -- that there was active collusion between englands backed supposed forces of law and order and englands-loyalists paramilitaries wanting to maintain englands rule.

It said Nelson kept his FRU handlers informed of much of what he was doing, and that there were gaping holes in otherwise meticulously kept records of his contacts with the unit, one of the army's most closely guarded secrets.

The FRU, it said, even went so far as to review the UDA's target list to bring it up to date on a regular basis, but even then managed -- fatally -- to get many names wrong, resulting in the wrong people being gunned down.

It said Nelson, who was finally arrested in 1990 when details of his involvement -- but not his links to englands army -- began to come to light, had even recruited serving soldiers to pass him details of wanted posters inside barracks.

These were in turn passed on the englands-loyalists hit squads.

Nelson was jailed for 10 years in 1992 for conspiracy to murder.

The revelations come a week after a newspaper reported that the third inquiry headed by London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens into Finucane's murder found the relationship between security police, army intelligence and englands-loyalist killers bordered on "institutionalized collusion."

Martin McGuinness, the north's education minister and deputy leader of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political ally, said the film made "a very compelling case for the establishment of a public and international inquiry into what has been going on."

He said the Finucane case could be "bigger than Bloody Sunday," the day in 1972 when englands-paratroopers opened fire on a march in Londonderry, killing 14 people.

Alex Attwood, spokesman on police affairs for the moderate Catholic nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, called the allegations in the documentary "profoundly disturbing" and demanded an independent inquiry