SAOIRSE32

Sunday Life

John McGurk
19 March 2006

A poignant face from Ulster’s troubled past is set to be one of the ’stars’ at a top London art sale.

For a poster of Belfastman Anthony O’ Shaughnessy’s appearance on the cover of a classic 1980 rock album is due to go on sale - with an asking price of up to £650!

The startling image of Anthony fleeing the sectarian trouble which erupted on the day internment was introduced - August 9, 1971 - was used as the cover picture for Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ album, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels.

Anthony, who was only 13 years old at the time, was pictured clutching a small suitcase and a holdall bag of belongings, as he and his family fled from Cranbrook Gardens in Belfast’s Ardoyne area.

The heart-tugging picture - later found in a pile of snaps in a London studio - made Anthony the centre of media attention upon the album’s release in 1980.

Now, nearly 26 years later, the image will feature among a galaxy of stars, including Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, in the Explosion! exhibition.

More than 40 classic original rock and pop posters, custom-framed album covers and other rock artefacts, will be displayed for sale in central London’s Movie Poster Art Gallery this summer.

Gallery spokesman Tim Maddison told Sunday Life: “Posters like this rarely survive. I had never seen one before and it is my own favourite from the show.”

The poster, which is conservation backed on Japanese paper, is on sale for £350 (unframed) or £650 (framed).

Other famous faces and iconic images in the Explosion! sale include Bob Dylan, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Johnny Cash and Led Zeppelin.

Sunday Life

Stephen Breen
19 March 2006

A Belfast man blinded in an LVF murder bid has been discharged from hospital . . . eight months after he was shot.

David Hanley, an innocent victim of the loyalist feud who was left for dead by a gunman in a case of mistaken identity, is being cared for at home by heartbroken mum Valerie Wright.

The 21-year-old student was blasted once in the head and five times in the stomach last July.

He was on his way home when the LVF terrorist jumped out of an alleyway and pumped the bullets into him.

David has never spoken publicly about the gun attack that’s left him devastated. He’d been treated in the Royal Victoria Hospital since the murder bid.

But the surgeon who saved his life, Kishor Choudhari, gave the go-ahead for him to be discharged.

Valerie told Sunday Life how her son is still struggling to come to terms with losing his sight and the serious injuries he sustained to his stomach.

She said: “The only thing David lived for was his dogs. He cannot believe he’ll never be able to see his dogs again - he just can’t deal with being blind.

“I initially thought that David would not pull through, the fact he has survived is an absolute miracle.

“But it’s hard for us to give him hope when he has told us that he wants to die, because he no longer has his sight.”

She added: “The slightest sound scares him - the nurses in the ward were moved to tears because of what has happened to him.

“David’s even afraid to go to the toilet because he is afraid of urinating on the floor. He thinks he has nothing without his sight. He’s completely terrified - it’s hard to believe another human being could do this.

“The LVF may have disbanded, but look at the way they have left my son - they are sub-human.”

Valerie has had to give up work after David’s discharge from hospital.

“I was due to start a new course, too, but I had to give this up because I have to look after my son on a full-time basis.

“Our lives have been shattered, but I would hate to see any other family going through what we are.

“The monster who committed this terrible act must be taken off the streets before he does the same thing to some other innocent person.”

Sunday Life

Assets Recovery Agency in for shock - ‘brigadier of bling’ was skint when he died

Stephen Breen and Ciaran McGuigan
19 March 2006

Loyalist godfather Jim ‘Doris Day’ Gray blew his entire fortune . . . UP HIS NOSE!

The bleach-haired UDA ‘brigadier of bling’ - who shamelessly led the high-life on proceeds from drug dealing and rackets - had spent almost every penny he had before he was gunned down.

Most of his ill-gotten gains were blown on his insatiable appetite for the three Cs - COCAINE, CHAMPAGNE and designer CLOTHES.

Loyalist sources have revealed that Gray’s flash lifestyle belied the fact that by the end he was actually up to his neck in debt - even his status symbol BMW was on tick.

“Claims about Gray’s wealth have been greatly exaggerated,” said one leading east Belfast loyalist.

“Sure he made a fortune when he was running his rackets. But he spent it as fast as it was coming in.

“By the end, the UDA had booted him out, the cops were all over him like a rash and his money was slipping away.”

Last year, the Assets Recovery Agency won a court order freezing Gray’s assets, believed to be worth about £200,000.

They included an interest in a house in the Clarawood estate in east Belfast and a top-of-the-range BMW M5, worth over £60,000.

However, if loyalist sources are right, Gray was so heavily in debt that his net worth may turn out to be only a fraction of the value of the assets that were frozen.

Said one loyalist source: “When Gray died he had very little money left.

“Everything that he owned was on credit, the house and cars and whatever. All the money was gone.

“What he didn’t snort up his nose went on the foreign holidays, the flash clothes and the rest of his ‘bling bling’ lifestyle. He loved showing off, playing the big man, taking his cronies on holiday or for weekends in plush hotels.”

At a court hearing in May, 2005, it was revealed Gray received £130,000 from the sale of two pubs in east Belfast, the Bunch of Grapes and the Avenue One.

But it is understood the money quickly disappeared as Gray’s life in the fast lane gathered pace.

Fellow UDA bosses gave Gray the boot last year, after even they became embarrassed by his flamboyant lifestyle and his Mafia-style crime empire.

In just one weekend in Dublin, the perma-tanned gangster spent more than £20,000, living it up in a penthouse suite at the plush Merrion Hotel and guzzling gallons of champagne.

Financial investigators had originally hoped to retrieve a net amount of around £100,000 from Gray’s assets.

Boston Globe

Ex-IRA leader’s daughter ridiculed

By Kevin Cullen
March 19, 2006

At 26, Toiréasa Ferris wondered whether she was cut out for a career in politics. Then she went on national television in Ireland last month, showed a little leg, and all hell broke loose.

In the newspapers and on the airwaves, she was ridiculed as a bimbo for wearing a revealing skirt. And as the daughter of a former Irish Republican Army commander, she was vilified for refusing to condemn the IRA murder of a policeman that took place 10 years ago.

Now, Ferris is determined to seek higher office. In their fervor to humiliate her and drive her from public life, Ferris said last week during a visit to Boston, her critics have convinced her she should run for the Dail, Ireland’s parliament.

‘’I was called a slut and a tart. Some people seemed so determined to push me out of politics, it got me thinking: They must be afraid of something,” said Ferris, who is a Sinn Féin councilor and leader of Kerry County Council, in southwest Ireland, and the daughter of Martin Ferris, once one of the IRA’s most senior commanders, and himself a member of the Dail.

In many post-conflict societies, it is not unusual for former fighters and their children to become civic leaders, but in Ireland this transition has been marked by lingering animosity. Twelve years after the IRA called the cease-fire that ended widespread violence, and eight years after the Good Friday Agreement provided a road map to a peaceful future, there is still enormous bitterness directed at the Sinn Fein party, long regarded as the political wing of the IRA.

That anger persists even after the IRA disarmed last year and directed its fighters to devote all their energy to achieving a united Ireland through peaceful, democratic methods. Even as Sinn Fein has grown to represent most Catholics in Northern Ireland, and become a growing force in the Irish Republic, some dismiss the party’s leaders as apologists for terrorists.

In Washington, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was dogged during St. Patrick’s Day festivities by the families of two dead men — one from Belfast, the other from Dublin — who say Sinn Fein has not done enough to bring their IRA killers to justice. The families of Robert McCartney and Joseph Rafferty say that if Sinn Fein members want to be treated as democrats, they must expose thuggish elements in their midst.

Toiréasa Ferris said she is part of a new crop of Sinn Féin politicians — those who want to talk about bread-and-butter issues, like healthcare, as much as ending the partition of the island. But she said some people refuse to get beyond ‘’the politics of condemnation,” in which Sinn Fein officials are constantly attacked for past actions of the IRA. While Sinn Fein supports the IRA, the party insists it cannot be held accountable for the IRA’s actions, and that efforts to force it to do so are politically motivated.

As Toiréasa Ferris spoke with a reporter at the Boston Harbor Hotel, the water over her shoulder provided a dramatic and ironic backdrop: 22 years ago, a fishing trawler laden with $1 million worth of weapons bound for the IRA sailed out of Boston Harbor; her father was arrested after he collected that arms shipment off the coast of Kerry. He spent 10 years in prison, emerging as one of the leading IRA figures to argue it was time for the fighters to let the politicians take control of the republican movement.

When Toiréasa Ferris appeared on ‘’The Late, Late Show,” Ireland’s most-watched talk show, she described how difficult it was for her and her five siblings growing up while their father was in prison. The host, Pat Kenny, asked her to condemn the IRA men who shot and killed police officer Jerry McCabe in a 1996 robbery in County Limerick, but Ferris refused, saying she sympathized with the McCabes but would not single out one death in a conflict that cost more than 3,000 lives.

Ferris speaks three languages and has two college degrees, but she was derided in some press accounts as stupid. Eilis O’Hanlon, a columnist in the Sunday Independent of Dublin, dismissed Ferris as ‘’breathtakingly fatuous,” and said the young politician symbolized how ‘’a movement which positioned itself as a serious-minded and credible alternative to mainstream Irish politics” had descended ‘’into pantomime and farce.”

‘’Once their appeal could be summed up by the whiff of cordite,” O’Hanlon wrote. ‘’Now it’s glimpses of cellulite that they most have to worry about.”

O’Hanlon’s sister, Siobhan, now an adviser to Adams, was an IRA member who served four years in prison, and their uncle was Joe Cahill, the IRA’s former chief of staff — suggesting how deeply personal this can get.

Ferris said the attacks on her were sexist and politically motivated. She said she got letters of support from many ordinary people, even those who said they were not Sinn Fein supporters.

‘’The only thing that really disappointed me in all of this was the silence of women’s organizations,” said Ferris. ‘’The skirt I wore was not short, but even if I had chosen to wear a short skirt, what’s the problem?”

She said when her Sinn Fein colleague Mary Lou McDonald, a member of the European parliament, put on weight recently, McDonald was vilified in the press for being fat. ‘’Mary Lou is pregnant,” she said. ‘’These attacks are ugly and personal.”

In Ireland, it seems, everything is personal. And so it is for Toireasa Ferris, as she withstands the brickbats and looks to higher office. To paraphrase what her party leader once said about the IRA, she isn’t going away, you know.

BBC

The Sinn Fein mayor of Newry and Mourne has said he intends to make a complaint to the Police Ombudsman after his family were stopped and searched.

Pat McGinn claimed his family were detained for a “considerable time” near their Bessbrook home on Saturday night and accused the PSNI of harassment.

It is understood that they were stopped at a routine vehicle checkpoint.

The police said that any concerns should be raised with ombudsman Nuala O’Loan’s office.

Sunday Life
19 March 2006

Three ‘rebel’ UVF men in west Belfast are now being blamed for putting a gun to the head of a Catholic taxi driver two weeks ago.

Loyalist sources say suspicion has now fallen on the trio despite initial blame being placed on other loyalist groups.

The finger is being pointed at a club manager and the son of a senior UVF member. “These two and their cronies have been spouting to their mates that they’re not accepting the ’stand down’ agenda and don’t care what the leadership says,” one loyalist told Sunday Life.

“They made up this story that Protestant taxi drivers were being harassed in nationalist areas and went out and hijacked a Catholic driver and threatened to kill him.

“Then they claimed it was the Red Hand Defenders and that put the blame on the UDA but it wasn’t them or the LVF.”

For the last number of weeks senior UVF figures have been meeting members of the terrorist organisation in their own areas around the province, telling them that their roles as terrorists have ended. The UVF is expected to make a formal public statement announcing its disbandment during the summer.

But some in its ranks are angry at the move. Said one Shankill loyalist: “There aren’t many of them who are expressing opposition but there are some and there’s a little group in the Shankill who think they can cause a few problems and believe they can defy the leadership.

“They’re nothing more than ceasefire soldiers but they are capable of causing a bit of disruption.”

BN.ie

19/03/2006 - 14:18:24

The family of a murdered Bangor shop assistant are considering re-mortgaging their home to treble the reward for information about her killing to £30,000 (€44,000), it emerged today.

Lisa Dorrian, 25, vanished after a party at a caravan site in Ballyhalbert, Co Down in February 2005.

But despite extensive air, land and sea searches no trace of her has been found.

Her sister Joanne, 22, confirmed her parents, John and Pat, may boost the current reward of £10,000 (€14,600) in a fresh bid to secure a breakthrough in the case.

The reward will be separate from the Lisa Dorrian Appeal Fund which has financed a billboard campaign to raise the profile of the murder.

Joanne said the family plan to discuss the proposal with their solicitor and the PSNI.

She said: “We are hoping to step up the campaign and show people that we are absolutely serious about bringing people to justice and getting Lisa’s body back.

“If people out there know who done this then £30,000 might be enough to make them come forward.”

Joanne said the only way the family could fund the additional £20,000 would be to re-mortgage their Conlig home.

The initial reward was for information which might lead to the recovery of Lisa’s body but the new fund is likely to pay out if someone is arrested and convicted.

Joanne revealed the family were anxious to take the campaign forward, just weeks after the first anniversary of Lisa’s disappearance.

She said: “We are trying to think of new things to do.

“We want to show the people who done this to Lisa that we are not going to go away.

“We just want to know where she is and leave justice up to the police.”

In a fresh appeal for information last month the PSNI revealed they believe Lisa’s body was dumped at sea.

A number of people have been arrested in connection with the murder but no one has been charged.

BN.ie

19/03/2006 - 13:41:53

A top Sinn Féin official kicked out of the party after he admitted being a British spy is living the life of a recluse in the hills of Donegal, it emerged today.

Denis Donaldson, 56, is staying in a run down cottage without running water or electricity and has to chop wood to make a fire.

It is understood the pre-famine property is five miles from the village of Glenties and there are no occupied homes nearby.

Donaldson was one of three men arrested in October 2002 following allegations of a republican spy-ring at Stormont.

But in December, shortly after the case against him collapsed, he was unmasked as a British agent.

The former aide to Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams sensationally admitted he had been a spy for more than 20 years.

He immediately fled his west Belfast home and has not been seen since giving a television interview in which he admitted his amazing double life.

The ex-prisoner was famously photographed with his arm around Bobby Sands in an iconic image that went round the world during the 1981 IRA hunger strike.

Donaldson is pictured today in the Sunday World newspaper outside the secluded cottage looking gaunt and with a scruffy beard.

He claimed he was sacrificed in a Secret Service plot to preserve the political career of the Ulster Unionist leader.

Donaldson told the paper: “The plan was to collapse the institutions to save Trimble – David Trimble was trying to out-DUP the DUP and in the end the DUP swallowed him up.

“The whole idea was to get Trimble off the hook and get republicans the blame.

“But it didn’t work because Trimble is history now.”

He added: “There was never a spy ring at Stormont.”

Donaldson also said he had no idea how documents relating to the private details of British Army Chief of Staff, hundreds of prison officers and other individuals came to be found in a holdall in his west Belfast home.

The ex-political aide told the newspaper he was not in contact with any of his former party colleagues.

But Donaldson denied being in hiding and said he simply wanted to be left alone.

Sunday Herald

By Paul Hutcheon, Scottish Political Editor
19 March 2006

A former IRA terrorist who helped bomb the 1984 Tory conference has insisted that Conservative MPs were a “legitimate target” for assassination.

Sinn Fein activist Martina Anderson, who visited Holyrood last week to discuss devolution, said the Brighton conference attack was aimed at people who defended the occupation of Ireland. She also said the IRA’s armed struggle against British rule in Ulster had been “vindicated”.

Her comments were made in an interview to coincide with her trip to the Scottish parliament. She met MSPs on a two-day tour to talk about devolution and her party’s green paper on Irish unity.

But her trip attracted controversy because of her past links to republican terrorism. The so-called “beauty queen bomber” was jailed for life in 1985 for planning a terror spree in 12 seaside towns in England. She was also implicated in the IRA’s assassination attempt on former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet during the 1984 Tory conference in Brighton.

The one-time Conservative leader escaped the blast, but five people were killed and 34 others injured.

But Anderson, who is Sinn Fein’s All Ireland co-ordinator, said she could offer an explanation for the attack.

“Brighton was a target for those people who were implementing British policy in Ireland. It was specifically targeted at those people who were implementing the occupation.”

She also said it would be wrong to divorce the Brighton bombing from the background of UK presence in Northern Ireland.

“I suppose … you would have preferred that those things didn’t have to happen. But none of the activities that the IRA has been involved in can be separated from the historical context from which they emerged.”

Asked if the attack on the Tory conference was legitimate, she said: “I can see why that would be a legitimate target. The conflict in Ireland at that time had been of such a magnitude.”

On whether the IRA’s armed struggle had been vindicated, she said: “Yes I do. I believe it was vindicated, born out of the Irish experience.”

Anderson also used the interview to call on Scots of Irish descent to get involved with the push towards a reunified Ireland.

“There’s a constitutional duty on the Irish government and people over here of Irish descent. We want the Irish diaspora abroad to be involved in the shaping of the new Ireland,” she said.

In particular, she said Sinn Fein had a message for people in the “urban belt” between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

“A new Ireland would appear to be coming. You should at least put pressure on the Irish government to produce a green paper, to at least lend your support. That’s the message we would like to send out to the Irish communities across Scotland.”

She also said there should be a “sharpening” of the links between Sinn Fein and other independence parties, such as the SNP and SSP.

“We would like to enter into a debate and a discussion. Whether or not it leads to formalised links, or whether it is about a shared understanding, who knows what will come out of it?,” she said.

Lord Tebbit, whose wife Margaret was confined to a wheelchair following the Brighton bombing, said: “She clearly feels no repentance and no remorse. This is a clear and implied willingness to undertake the same acts again.”

But Independent MSP Margo MacDonald defended Anderson’s Holyrood visit. “She came here to discuss how to advance the peace process. It does us no harm to understand people’s points of view,” she said.

Sunday Independent

19 March 2006

HEAVILY armed Irish troops in Liberia have been put on stand-by to arrest former president Charles Taylor, who is accused of war crimes, and bring him to trial in Sierra Leone.

Taylor, who is living in Nigeria, has been accused of commiting crimes against humanity by aiding and directing a Sierra Leone rebel movement and trading gems and guns with insurgents infamous for chopping off lips, ears and limbs of victims.

Sunday Times

Dearbhail McDonald
The Sunday Times
March 19, 2006

TWO Real IRA (RIRA) bomb-makers were among those arrested last week in connection with a large-scale cannabis-growing operation.

The men, former associates of Michael McKevitt, the jailed leader of the RIRA, were caught loading about 600 cannabis plants onto a lorry from a disused mushroom-growing shed in Co Louth last Tuesday night. Four men, including the bombers, were arrested following the discovery of the cannabis-growing operation at Grange Bellew.

Gardai removed hundreds of cannabis plants from the shed as well as dismantling lights, heating and irrigation systems. Gardai in Drogheda say they broke up a large-scale production facility in a follow-up operation.

A senior officer investigating the case said: “The Real IRA leadership is furious. It doesn’t reflect well to be seen to be peddling drugs, and it was careless too; one of the men had just been released from prison.”

All four men were later released and a file sent to James Hamilton, the director of public prosecutions.

The “hash gang” are linked to veteran dissident republicans, including a former Provisional IRA bomb-maker suspected of manufacturing the M50 toll-booth bomb.

The terrorist, who now makes car bombs on a freelance basis for Dublin criminals, fled his home in Dundalk last month. Gardai also suspect him of manufacturing the M1 car bomb at Cloghran, Co Dublin.

Sunday Times

Enda Leahy
The Sunday Times
March 19, 2006

A FORMER British Army mole in the IRA has claimed that MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America in which he obtained detonators, later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police officers.

In a book to be published next month, the spy, who uses the pseudonym Kevin Fulton, describes in detail how British intelligence co-operated with the FBI to ensure his trip to New York in the 1990s went ahead without incident so that his cover would not be blown.

He claims the technology he obtained has been used in Northern Ireland and copied by terrorists in Iraq in roadside bombs that have killed British troops.

In the book, Unsung Hero, Fulton tells of his double life in which he had to play a convincing IRA man while working for the British. “You cannot pretend to be a terrorist,” said Fulton, who now lives outside Northern Ireland. “I had to be able to do the exact same thing as the IRA man next to me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be there.”

His allegations that the security services helped to obtain weapons that killed their own members follow revelations about British infiltration of terrorist groups and collusion in paramilitary killings.

The issue has been the subject of investigations by Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner.

Fulton’s book will include claims from his own experience that MI5 and the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary colluded in the murder of their own officers and soldiers and allowed agents to be killed.

Fulton, a married Catholic now in his forties, was serving in the army when he was recruited by military intelligence to infiltrate the IRA. He later worked for the Force Research Unit, a covert branch of the Intelligence Corps set up to infiltrate paramilitary groups.

For 13 years Fulton was an IRA terrorist, involved first in courier runs, later as a driver and enforcer, and finally as a master bomb-maker in a unit in Newry, Co Down, credited with numerous advances in explosive technologies. “I was recruited as a serving British soldier,” he said. “I was in the Royal Irish Rangers. I agreed to go into the IRA as a soldier.”

Security sources have said Fulton was implicated in numerous bombings and shootings, allegations on which he declines to comment. He has said his handlers knew the nature of his role but ignored his warnings of forthcoming bomb attacks, including the Omagh atrocity, which killed 29 people in 1998.

Fulton and four other members of his unit in Newry pioneered the use of flash guns to detonate bombs. This technology was used in a bomb that killed Colleen McMurray, an RUC officer, in 1992. Her colleague Paul Slaine lost both his legs in the attack. He was later awarded the George Cross for his bravery.

Fulton claims he tipped off his handlers about this attack but they allowed it to go ahead to protect agents. “Two days before the attack on Slaine and McMurray I knew my officer commanding was using what we called a doodlebug, a horizontal mortar,” he said.

“I told my MI5 handlers and they took me to London for two days. The day I came back the bomb went off. The police were taken off the streets to allow the bomber to get in, set the device and get out.”

The trip to America came after the killing of McMurray, when the IRA had built sufficient trust in Fulton for commanders to send him abroad to buy remote control infrared devices that would allow IRA teams to refine the flash technique and detonate explosives from up to a mile away.

When he told his MI5 handlers about the mission, they arranged with the FBI to procure the detonators for Fulton.

In this month’s edition of Atlantic Monthly, Fulton outlines how an MI5 agent was sent ahead of him by Concorde to make preparations. He has also described the trip in interviews with The Sunday Times over the past few months.

In New York he attended a meeting with FBI agents and British intelligence officers. There he agreed to expose IRA operatives in America to the FBI. However, the same terrorists, who were arrested months later, were first allowed to procure and send the infrared technology to the IRA. Fulton claims this technology was used in the Troubles and forms the basis for insurgent bombs in Iraq.

A spokesman for the security service declined to comment.

Independent

By Greg Harkin
Published: 19 March 2006

It was just another St Patrick’s weekend in Washington. The Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern presented shamrock to President George Bush, the Northern Ireland political parties continued to bicker over who is responsible for the latest impasse, and green beer was drunk by the gallon.

This weekend, however, a new cloud hangs over the legacy of the Troubles and the alleged role played in a number of deaths by both American and British security agencies.

The claim - if true - threatens a new political storm over how and why FBI officials and MI5 operatives conspired to supply deadly bomb-making equipment to the Provisional IRA in the early 1990s, mechanisms the paramilitary organisation later shared with Palestinian fighters.

Today in Iraq the same technology is being used by insurgents to kill and maim British and American soldiers.

Six months ago, when The Independent on Sunday first broke the story, the Secretary of State for Defence, John Reid, was forced into a humiliating retraction.

For weeks his officials had claimed that bombs which killed eight British soldiers in separate attacks in Basra had been supplied to foreign fighters by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Our story showed that the technology, far from being new, had in fact first been used in Newry, Co Down, in 1992 to murder a policewoman and maim her male colleague.

Kevin Fulton, a former soldier who infiltrated the IRA on behalf of the security services, made an astonishing claim: that he had flown to New York, met FBI and MI5 agents and was given money to buy an infra-red device to be used to set off IRA bombs.

The security services - already successful in preventing radio-signal bombs - believed that by supplying the equipment they could then introduce counter-measures.

“They knew the IRA was looking at the technology. By supplying the equipment, they thought they could stay one step ahead of the IRA,” Mr Fulton told the IoS yesterday.

Following our article in October, an investigative journalist from the American magazine Atlantic delved deeper. And in an article to be published next week, Matthew Teague claims FBI sources have confirmed Mr Fulton’s trip to the United States.

“I was satisfied with Fulton’s story after checking it with FBI sources. I also had a record of Fulton’s stay at a New York hotel at the time he said he was there,” Mr Teague said. He said the article had already sparked a wave of interest before it hit the news-stands and he was aware of a number of senior American politicians who were waiting for publication before raising the issue in Congress.

The IoS has also spoken to a republican who was a senior IRA member in the early 1990s. He confirmed that Mr Fulton had introduced the IRA to the new technology and that the IRA shared this with “like-minded organisations abroad”.

Mr Fulton currently lives in hiding in England and is taking legal action against the MoD, insisting he should receive a soldier’s pension. A former member of the Royal Irish Rangers, he infiltrated the IRA after being recruited directly from the regiment by the shadowy army outfit the Force Research Unit, which ran agents inside loyalist and republican organisations.

Mr Teague says Mr Fulton answered “no comment” to claims that he had been responsible for 11 murders while working as an agent and that he had been given carte blanche to kill by his handlers.

Yesterday Mr Fulton refused to comment on those claims again, but asked about his New York arms-buying trip, he said: “I have been in touch with representatives of some senior American politicians in the past few days and I’ve told them that I am willing to travel back and appear before Congress if necessary.”

The Police Ombudsman in Northern Ireland has been investigating the FBI/MI5 link to the murder of Constable Colleen McMurray, 34, who was killed when an IRA Mark 12 mortar hit the side of her patrol car as it travelled along Merchants Quay, Newry, on 26 March 1992. Officer Paul Slane, who was travelling with her, lost his legs.

Guardian

American court case targets Libya for supplying explosives that killed or maimed thousands

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday March 19, 2006
The Observer

Victims of IRA atrocities are to sue the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi and his government in what their lawyers say is the largest ever civil action involving terrorism in the UK.

Survivors of the attacks and relatives of those killed, from the UK and abroad, are seeking millions of pounds in compensation and an apology from Libya through courts in the United States. They claim that for more than three decades Libya supplied war materials that left their relatives dead or themselves scarred, physically and psychologically, for life.

Michelle Williamson, 40, whose parents Gillian and George were killed by the 1993 bomb in a fish shop in Belfast’s Shankill Road, said: ‘Libya can’t wash its hands of responsibility. It’s like the pub owner who knowingly supplies drink to a customer knowing he or she is going to drive home drunk. If that driver kills someone, the person who plied him or her with drink bears some responsibility.’

American Mark McDonald, 55, an oceanographer from Colorado, was peppered with shrapnel by an IRA bomb outside Harrods in west London in 1983. He spent 10 weeks in hospital and still has fragments lodged in his body. ‘I see this action as part of making the world safer because it might make other states thinking of sponsoring terrorism think again,’ he said.

The civil action, to be launched next month, is similar to that being pursued by relatives of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US against rich Saudis accused of financing al-Qaeda.

Lawyers for the IRA victims say papers will be filed in New York or Washington DC for a ’spearhead group’ of around 20 plaintiffs. Victims’ groups hope hundreds more people from Northern Ireland, Britain, the US and beyond will join the class action, which targets Libya and named individuals associated with the regime’s policy of sponsoring Irish terrorists. Lawyers say up to 6,000 people were killed or injured with Libyan supplied guns and explosives.

Among the individuals accused are Gadaffi himself and Nasser Ali Ashour, who in the mid-Eighties was third in command of Libyan intelligence and allegedly liaised directly with republican leaders including the South Armagh smuggler and former IRA chief of staff, Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy. Gadaffi sent five huge arms shipments, - enough to supply at least two infantry battalions - to the IRA in the Eighties. Stung by Margaret Thatcher’s logistical support for US air strikes against Libya, the Libyan leader authorised the smuggling operation that gave the IRA enough guns and explosives to wage war against Britain well into the 21st century.

Jason McCue, who is heading the case for the London-based legal firm H20, said: ‘Libya sponsored the IRA. The IRA utilised their help to foster their terrorist campaign. Innocent people who got caught up in that campaign suffered dreadful losses. Libya wants in from the cold. They want to normalise into international commerce and society. They have to put their terrorist past behind them. But like anyone else they are accountable for their past actions. They need to settle their dues. This action is one avenue down which they can address such matters.

‘Libya has paid compensation to the victims of Lockerbie. It is now being sued for sponsoring Middle East terrorism. It is time they addressed the IRA victims because it beggars belief that Libya has never even apologised to those victims.’

McCue and his team will use two separate American laws to pursue both the Libyan state and leading members of its ruling apparatus. As only US citizens can file claims against other nations, Americans caught up in IRA attacks will sue under the 1996 Foreign Sovereignty Immunity Act. British citizens will sue individuals through the Torture Victims Protection Act 1991. The case will be fought on a no win, no fee basis.

Semtex from Libya provided the main element of bombs such as the one that exploded on the Shankill Road in 1993, and small quantities of the colourless explosive also acted as ‘boosters’ for larger devices that devastated parts of London in the early Nineties. H20 is hoping victims of bombings such as those at Canary Wharf and in Manchester will join the class action in America.

A spokesman for the Libyan embassy in London said yesterday that the consul was unavailable for comment.

Case history

Michael Clarke, an American, was serving at the US naval base on Lough Foyle in Northern Ireland as a communications officer in the early Seventies. He was caught up in five terror attacks in Derry from 1971 to 1973. He returned to settle in the city five years ago and is now doing youth work for the Church of Ireland.

‘The worst was the explosion at a bank on Strand Road in late 1973,’ he said. ‘I only avoided being killed because I walked back down the road to encourage a couple of friends of mine to hurry up and join us.

‘I remember seeing this shop blowing up, the glass shattering everywhere, this huge bang. By that time I was already close to being a total wreck after the other attacks, including being caught in crossfire during an Army-IRA gun battle.

‘After the bomb on Strand Road, though, I couldn’t sleep. I was drinking heavily. I was getting angry all the time. I had lost many friends.

‘Over the years the effect on my physical and mental health was slow burning. I was still on trauma courses right up to 1998.

‘It even affected my desire to study for the ministry in the Presbyterian Church. I had to give that up because of all my problems. Many people like myself have been traumatised by being caught up in the violence. This legal action is one way to draw a line under the past.

‘I hope others caught in the Troubles will join this action. I know of several cases involving young US servicemen.’