Web layout by SAOIRSE -- Irish Freedom
April 4, 1998
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David Keys (26) former member of the British army from Banbridge, Co. Down had been beaten extensively and both his wrists were slashed before he was hung, presumably by his fellow LVF prisoners. The three other loyalist men charged with the Poyntzpass murders also served in the British army. Stephen McClean (28) , Noel McCready (31) and Ryan Robley (28) all served in the UDR up to the early 1990s while David Keys was a former member of the RIR (the UDR’s new name from July 1, 1992).
There was speculation that David Keys was killed because he was making incriminating statements to the British colonial police (RUC) about the Poyntzpass killings. No non-LVF prisoners were in the LVF wing of H-Block 6 at the time of the killing. On March 19 it was reported that between 10 and 15 LVF prisoners were taken out of the H-Blocks for questioning about the killing by the RUC.
Another LVF prisoner who was arrested by the RUC as he was being released from prison on March 15 has been freed.
After the killing of suspected LVF informer David Keys on March 15 comes increasing speculation that the British colonial police (RUC) made a breakthrough in their continuing interrogation of LVF prisoners and acquired another informer.
Reports in the media on March 22 said that an LVF prisoner had been switched from Long Kesh prison hospital the previous day (Saturday 21) to a cell in Maghberry prison. It is believed that the move to an isolated part of Maghaberry will lead to evidence against other LVF prisoners. Keys was awaiting trial for the double killing of Philip Allen and Damien Trainor in Poyntzpass at the beginning of March. When it comes to Crown forces killers, the British will always protect their own, but heads must roll among their colonial underlings in the death-squads.
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At 3.50am, Brian Thompson, his wife and three teenage children were awakened when a petrol bomb was thrown at the living room window at their Greymount Crescent home. Brian Thompson says that his family have been subjected to a stream of abuse and ongoing arson attacks from loyalists for a number of years.
“We were threatened three years ago. They told us they would burn us out and they have eventually done it”. The house suffered extensive fire damage. He said his brother-in-law was also forced to leave his home in the district.
Also on March 29 loyalist incendiaries attempted to burn down the nearby Star of the Sea Youth Club.
A number of skylights were destroyed as inflammable liquid was poured into them on the roof of the club in the early hours of the morning.
Youth Club leader, John Rodgers said: “Any damage done to the youth club is substantial as the club is run on a tight budget”. Upwards of 150 young people attend the club for Saturday night football. The club was able to open as usual that night.
Residents of the Carlea Parade and York Road area had to be evacuated from their homes as nine fire appliances tried to deal with the massive blaze.
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The original application by Dublin County Council for the siting of the landfill site resulted in 1200 objections being lodged which were upheld by Kildare County Council. Following an appeal to An Bord Pleanala by South Dublin County Council permission was granted.
A lengthy campaign by the people of Kill, with the support of the entire county, waged both inside and outside the courtroom ensued, culminating in the judgement by the Supreme Court on March 25 last.
Dumping began on the site in October last year. The Arthurstown site was intended to be the largest dump of its kind in Ireland, receiving some five million tons of municipal waste over a ten year period.
However because of the prolonged legal battle it now seems likely that South Dublin County Council will seek permission to extend its lifespan beyond 2004 when dumping at the site is due to end.
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The man, believed to be named Anthony Martin, has finished a five-year sentence for possession of firearms.
His arrest and subsequent appearance in a Dublin District Court, where he was remanded in custody back to Portlaoise, had not been reported in the media as we went to press (April 2).
He is now added to the cases of Angelo Fusco (Belfast) and Anthony Duncan (Dublin) whose extradition cases to the Six Counties and Britain, respectively, were before the courts during February and March.
Anthony Kelly (36) from Derry was served with an extradition warrant at his home in Letterkenny on October 22, 1997. The previous April Dermot McNally, a native of Lurgan, Co Armagh, was served with a British extradition warrant at his home in Sligo.
These arrests are clearly part of a hidden agenda of the current process — to intensify collaboration between the 26 Counties and Britain. Meanwhile the families of these men are left to campaign for justice while former Republicans sellout for an internal Six-County settlement within the structures of British rule.
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The other two were discovered on Wednesday afternoon, still at the firing point near the Slievegullion Inn, at the junction of the Old Bridge and Carrickasticken roads. British Army bomb experts carried out a controlled explosion on the remaining devices.
Meanwhile Crown Forces were called in to examine a device at Glassdrummand near the south Armagh village on Wednesday March 25. It was reported that what appeared to be two mortar launch tubes had been found near a British army observation post.
A statement from the British Colonial office at Stormont said they had no indication the attack was the work of the Provisionals. The statement was backed up by the Colonial police Chief, Ronnie Flannagan, who said he did not believe the Provisional IRA was behind the recent bombings. No organisation has as yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
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The Republican Sinn Féin member, whose flat was ransacked and personal property taken, was arrested at gun-point under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act, on suspicion of membership of a proscribed organisation.
“As I awoke, the door had been kicked in and the next thing there were guns being pointed at my head,” Bearcheart Ó Casaide told SAOIRSE. “They were roaring ‘armed garda, don’t move’ and told me to put my hands up very slowly.
“What concerned me most was that these gun-toting Branchmen seemed very nervous and agitated, as their hands were trembling. I was worried that one of them might lose his head and start firing”.
After being cautioned under Section 30, Bearcheart was taken to Terenure Garda station for questioning by the 26-County political police. During his detention, which lasted for more than twelve hours, he was told by his interrogators that the Provos might come looking for him. “When they (the Provos) come for you, you won’t be walking out of your flat like you did with us,” they warned.
Such threats and acts of harassment and intimidation will not succeed in silencing Republican Sinn Féin’s opposition to the so-called peace process. True Republicans will continue to oppose this latest sell-out, and demand that the British withdraw from Ireland.
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It was announced on March 10, that Lieutenant-General Hew Pike who served as CO of 3 Para in occupied Ireland from 1980 to 1983 is to take over command of the British army in the Six Counties. The fact that Britain’s management enforcers should have as their new chief, a member of a notorious combat regiment speaks multitudes.
Pike has been quoted as saying that he favours a “surge” policy for the Six Counties if necessary swamping nationalist areas with troops. “If you want to win wars, you must allow us to discriminate”, he said. So dealingwith Irish civilians is war? So much for the alleged peace process.
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A report in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph on March 29 now backs up this assertion. The newspaper claimed it had seen secret files which showed how British
Military Intelligence had infiltrated Brian Nelson into the UDA/UFF death squads to “ensure proper targeting” of nationalists prior to any shootings. The newspaper called it “assassination by proxy”.
At least 15 nationalists were shot dead as a result of information supplied to Nelson. Nelson, from the Shankill Road, Belfast, and a former member of the British army’s Black Watch Regiment was sentenced to ten years in 1992 on conspiracy to murder charges. He was released in 1997.
He had worked as an intelligence officer in the UDA but was unmasked after the Stevens inquiry set up to investigate collusion between Crown Forces and the Loyalist death squads exposed him as a British army agent.
One of the secret documents — known as contact forms — relate to a conversation between Nelson and a British Intelligence Officer from the “Force Research Unit” pointing out which nationalists were to be assassinated by the death squads.
One of them was Provisional Councillor Alex Maskey, who narrowly escaped being killed by the group. Nelson is quoted by the paper as telling his handler that he had personally been involved in the attack and that his unit would make another attempt on Maskey’s life.
British Military Intelligence have a long involvement with the death squads going back to the 1970s in the present phase of the struggle and beyond. British Military Intelligence helped in the importation of weapons from the Apartheid regime in South Africa to the loyalist pro-British death squads, as they have been responsible for the formation and arming of the UVF in the early part of this century.
Former British Attorney General, Patrick Mayhew was responsible for a deal which saw murder charges being dropped against Nelson in favour of a ten year sentence.
The FRU was renamed after the Nelson expose and is operating again in the same undercover fashion in the Six Counties.
The incident on January 15 last in which a female British soldier in plain clothes shot and injured an RUC officer at Carlisle Circus in Belfast is believed to involve this British army unit.
At the time the UDA and other loyalist death squads were involved in an upsurge of assassinations of nationalists and the British army woman and another group in a second unmarked car were probably gathering information on nationalist targets to be handed over to loyalist death squads.
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The Committee by Irish journalist and TV producer Seán McPhilemy is based on the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary of the same name broadcast on British television on October 2, 1991.
The programme and the book claim that a secret Ulster Loyalist Central Co-Ordinating Committee (ULCCC) was set up in the aftermath of the signing of the Hillsborough Deal between London and Dublin in 1985 and orders the assassinations of selected nationalists.
Details were provided to the journalist by a source described as a former member of the ULCCC. New material in the book lists 26 of those involved in the committee, which has been seen by the Ireland on Sunday newspaper.
In its March 15 edition the newspaper says it has also been shown the names of five other “associate members”, including senior named Unionist politicians. The list includes senior businessmen, lawyers and very high-ranking RUC and UDR (now renamed RIR) officers.
McPhilemy’s source is quoted as saying that there are 60 members of the ULCCC, including 18 from an ‘Inner Force’ in the RUC colonial police. The rest is made up of members from the loyalist death squads, UDA/UFF, UVF, UPAF, including at one time ‘King Rat’ Billy Wright and ‘The Jackal’, a UVF member.
The role of the Inner Force (controlled in turn by an elite called the ‘Inner Circle’) was to provide details of nationalist targets to “The Committee”, propose the assassination of individuals and to assist the loyalist death squads in carrying out attacks.
Intelligence files and even weapons were provided to the killers by the Inner Force, who also ensured they had 15 minutes to leave the area after the attacks.
McPhilemy lists in the book 18 murders carried out by the ULCCC between 1989 and September 1991, including the assassination of lawyer Pat Finucane in Belfast in February 1989. A second list contains 31 murders between October 2, 1991 (the date the Channel 4 documentary was broadcast) and July 1996 when Lurgan , Co Armagh nationalist Michael McGoldrick was killed by loyalists during the Drumcree Orange parade crisis.
The book states that since “The Ulster Central Co-ordinating Committee controlled the death squads” between 1991 and 1996 the committee members named in the book can be “regarded as being among the ‘prime suspects’ for most, if not all, of these murders”.
In a front-page editorial on the revelations of collusion on Channel 4 in October 1991 Republican Sinn Féin’s SAOIRSE newspaper called for an end to the collaboration with the British Crown Forces by the 26-County administration in Leinster House. In particular SAOIRSE called for the Dublin administration and its then leader Charles Haughey “to stop handing over photographs and intelligence files on Irish people to those who would set them up for assassination”.
The editorial also called for the ending of ‘the shameful extradition of Irish citizens into the hands of these assassins”. Such collaboration meant nothing less than complicity in the deaths of fellow Irishmen and women, the paper said.
McPhilmey has won a number of libel actions against the British media since the original broadcast in October 1991. The Sunday Express newspaper was forced to apologise in court and pay McPhilemy libel costs and damages believed to amount to £500,000.
He is still pursuing a court action against the Sunday Times newspaper, its former editor Andrew Neil and the present Six-County correspondent Liam Clarke, which is scheduled for the London High Court in October 1998.
He has said that some of those named in his book could be called to the witness box, including one senior Unionist politician who he says is “the leader of the political wing of the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee”.
The RUC had a researcher on the Channel 4 documentary arrested by London police on perjury charges after the broadcast. The charges against Ben Hamilton were abruptly dropped without explanation, and he described the move as a “vindication” of the programme. Another legal move by the RUC tried to force Channel 4 to reveal the identity of its source. The case resulted in Channel 4 being found guilty of contempt of court and fined £75,000. No name was ever released by the programme makers or Channel 4.
A further contempt case brought by the then British Attorney-General Patrick Mayhew (later British Direct Ruler in the Six Counties) in an effort to force the programme makers and Channel 4 to reveal their sources failed.
Pat Finucane’s law firm, Madden and Finucane are suing the British Ministry of Defence for negligence and derogation of duty in failing to warn Pat Finucane when they knew the UDA/UFF was targeting him.
British military intelligence was warned at least twice by their double agent in the UDA/UFF, Brian Nelson, that Finucane was being targeted, facts which emerged at Nelson’s trial.
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Web layout by SAOIRSE -- Irish Freedom April 4, 1998 Send links, events notifications, articles, comments etc, to the editor at: saoirse@iol.ie marked "attention web-editor". |