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21/1/2007
RUC collusion officers still in police force
By Colm Heatley
21 January 2007
A number of policemen implicated in the Police Ombudsman’s report into collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and loyalist paramilitaries in the 1990s are still serving in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), according to senior sources.
A number of policemen implicated in the Police Ombudsman’s report into collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and loyalist paramilitaries in the 1990s are still serving in the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), according to senior sources.
The report, which will be published tomorrow, concludes that RUC Special Branch officers colluded in 18 murders in the North between 1990 and 2003 committed by a north Belfast Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang led by police informer Mark Haddock.
The report concludes that senior police colluded with - and protected from prosecution - loyalist killers.
Some of the officers have since retired, including the two most senior Special Branch men mentioned in the report, who ran agents within the UVF.
In the public version of the report, which has been shortened to 150 pages, the names of those implicated have been removed, but the private version, sent to PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde and Northern secretary Peter Hain last Friday, identifies the policemen and UVF agents involved.
A number of policemen mentioned in the report, and implicated in a number of sectarian murders in Belfast during the 1990s, have gone on to forge careers within the PSNI.
The Ombudsman’s report was initially launched to investigate the murder of 22-year-old Protestant man, Raymond McCord Jr, in north Belfast in 1997, but was expanded to cover the activities of the same UVF gang in more than a dozen other murders.
The report will say that those who ordered and carried out McCord’s murder, as well as other murders including that of 27-year-old Catholic woman Sharon McKenna, were Special Branch agents.
Haddock is serving ten years in prison for grievous bodily harm.
The new head of Haddock’s former UVF unit is understood to be the man who killed McCord and is suspected of still being a police informer.
The revelation that some of the officers implicated are still serving members of the PSNI has caused concern among nationalists in the North.
Next Sunday, Sinn Fein will hold an ard fheis to debate whether to support the PSNI.
A series of Sinn Fein-sponsored public meetings on policing are to be held in the North this week.
A number of the crimes investigated by the Police Ombudsman took place after 2001, when the Patten reforms were supposed to have curbed the worst excesses of Special Branch.
The report uncovered evidence that Special Branch actively protected their informers, even when they had committed sectarian murders.
The Ombudsman’s report was sent to the Department of Public Prosecution last year.
However, the DPP has yet to decide on whether to proceed with recommendations to charge officers.
‘I will pursue my son’s murderers’
Controversial report to reveal that the RUC and paramilitaries colluded in a reign of terror
Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer
Raymond McCord will tomorrow receive a report that will shake the security apparatus of Northern Ireland to its foundations. He will be handed the findings of an investigation into his son’s murder that will include the revelation that the RUC Special Branch allowed informers to kill, maim and intimidate without fear of arrest or prosecution.
Nine years ago a grieving McCord, 51, launched his campaign to discover the truth about the murder of Raymond junior, and uncovered a reign of terror by the north Belfast Ulster Volunteer Force to which police officers and their senior commanders turned a blind eye. His campaign will be vindicated by Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan, who will publish her report tomorrow into the activities of the police and loyalist paramilitary informers
Since his son was battered to death by members of the UVF’s notorious Mount Vernon unit in 1997, McCord, brought up as a Protestant loyal to the British crown, has unearthed many uncomfortable facts against the often dirty war against terrorism. ‘When I started trying to find out what happened to young Raymond, I never imagined how big a can of worms this whole thing has been,’ he said
‘It’s now nine years since my lad was murdered, but I do feel vindicated by what the report will say. The public in Northern Ireland are going to find out first hand that I told the truth.
McCord junior, at the time of his murder a 22-year-old RAF cadet, fell out with the Mount Vernon UVF over the import of a large haul of cannabis into north Belfast. He had been a courier for the local UVF commander who, fearing he was about to be shot for drugs smuggling by his own organisation (the UVF officially opposes drugs and has shot dealers in the past), blamed the plot on his young acolyte. McCord was beaten to death in a so-called punishment attack at Ballyduff Brae on the northern outskirts of Belfast on 9 November, 1997.
At first his father sought explanations from the UVF, then officially on cease-fire, about why their members had killed his son. Yet as he dug deeper, talking to sources both inside the UVF and the police, he stumbled across a network of collusion between the gang responsible for at least 13 murders between 1993 and 2000 and their Special Branch handlers. The leader of the UVF unit, Mark Haddock, was later named under privilege in the Irish parliament, the Dail, as the man who allegedly instigated the murders while working as an informer
‘I never dreamt it would be that bad. It emerged that paramilitary commanders, not their foot soldiers, were informers and were being protected, including Mark Haddock. The more I uncovered, the more it became like one of those American conspiracy theory films… only this one was true.’
O’Loan’s report, which will be presented to both Peter Hain, the Secretary of State, and Chief Constable Hugh Orde, will name at least six Special Branch and CID officers who ran informants inside the so-called ‘Dirty Dozen’, the nucleus of the Mount Vernon UVF murder squad. Only Hain and Orde will see that confidential part of the report where the actual names of the officers are revealed. Privately the Northern Ireland Secretary has admitted that the British government is ‘going to take a hit’.
McCord likens the controversy over his son’s murder to the 1989 loyalist killing of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. Subsequent inquiries into the Finucane murder found that at least six Ulster Defence Association terrorists involved were also either agents of Special Branch or the British Army’s secretive Force Research Unit. But like the Finucane murder, it is highly likely that not a single officer accused of colluding with the loyalists will be charged. McCord is determined to bring out the police officers’ names into open court.
‘The taxpayer was paying for state agents who were openly killing innocent Catholics and Protestants, anyone that crossed them, and it’s time the public knew who was responsible for allowing that to happen… If the Director of Public Prosecutions says there is no public interest in prosecuting anyone over my son’s murder, then I will take a civil action against the handlers of these informants,’ he added.
On the Mount Vernon estate, just off the Shore Road, a menacing post-ceasefire UVF mural remains. It depicts masked gunmen holding sub-machine guns and above them a warning: ‘Prepared for peace, ready for war.’
For the likes of Raymond McCord and the relatives of at least another dozen of the Mount Vernon unit’s victims, their personal war against injustice will continue.
