'COLLUSION BY OMISSION' - LAWYERS NOT TOLD OF MURDER PLOT

national | miscellaneous | news report Saturday August 03, 2002 08:35 by McMean

The loyalist gang which assassinated lawyer Patrick Finucane also planned to shoot two more lawyers listed in British army intelligence files as being "sympathetic" to the IRA, according to a report today.

The lawyers targeted were Patrick McGrory and Oliver Kelly,
according to a report by BBC Panorama reporter John Ware in
today's Guardian newspaper.

The assassination plans against the two lawyers were discovered
by the Stevens inquiry, led by the current London police
commissioner John Stevens.

Neither lawyer was warned their lives were in peril. Sources
close to the Stevens inquiry suspect this was no accident,
according to the report. One detective has described it as
"collusion by omission".

Mr McGrory, who acted for the families of three unarmed IRA
members who were shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar, died in 1994.

Mr Kelly said: "This is what the cops were feeding out to
loyalists: if you defended someone in court you were acting
against the state. They felt that you should throw in the towel;
you shouldn't defend someone to the best of your ability.

"They were telling the loyalists to wipe us out - to take us out
of the road."

Three days after Finucane's death -- on February 16, 1989 -- the
RUC Special Branch received a report from one of its several
sources within the UDA that had killed Finucane that "Oliver
Kelly and PJ McGrory will be next".

The source stated that the threat came directly from the two UDA
leaders who had been heavily involed in Finucane's murder. Yet
neither Mr Kelly nor Mr McGrory was ever warned of this.

Mr Kelly said: "It just didn't happen. But I was hearing from
other sources what the cops were saying about us to loyalist type
persons - that we were up to our eyes in the Provos, we were
worse than the worst, we were orchestrating things and all that
nonsense."

Although neither Mr Kelly nor Mr McGrory were shot, in the case
of Mr McGrory - as with Finucane - details of the lawyer's
movements were collected by the British army's intelligence
agent, Brian Nelson. The draft Stevens report says the failure to
provide a warning was "another Finucane tragedy in the making".

The Stevens inquiry has recovered a targeting document received
by Nelson five months after Mr Finucane was shot. It records that
Mr McGrory spent "a lot of time" in the Chester bar on Belfast's
Antrim Road; that he went there "in the late afternoon" and that
every Sunday he visited the Kitchen bar to which he drove in his
Mercedes, which was parked "unprotected" nearby.

Although Mr Nelson passed the document to his British Army
handlers, none of the references to Mr McGrory were entered on to
their official record.

Barra McGrory, son the late defence lawyer, said the information
was "substantially accurate, which is what I find so deeply
shocking".


* Meanwhile, the new Chief Constable of the RUC/PSNI has said it
is "vital" to maintain an effective Special Branch, the police
unit which has long colluded with loyalists in the murder of
nationalists.

Mr Orde said he was determined to oversee the policing reforms
outlined in the Patten Report but he would not make changes in a
"knee-jerk" fashion.

"We must recognise the reality of the security situation in
Northern Ireland," he said. "From my previous experience, I know
that we need to use intelligence to take on the terrorists and
criminals and protect the communities they terrorise."