SAOIRSE32

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
The Observer
Sunday February 17 2008

One of Britain’s most important informers inside the IRA has warned new agents who are asked to penetrate terrorist organisations to ensure that they get a contract from their handlers to secure their future.

Hunted for the last 25 years by ex-comrades in the Derry IRA, Raymond Gilmour suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and a heart condition. Now virtually penniless and cut off by his former handlers, Gilmour spoke to The Observer this weekend about his sense of betrayal and the need for future agents to ensure that they are looked after for the rest of their lives.

Speaking from a secret location in England, Gilmour said: ‘If I was a young kid, say from the Muslim community in Britain, thinking of working for the state inside one of the Islamic terrorist groups I would make sure I obtained a contract. I would ask for a legal document ensuring that, given the risks I was about to take, the state looked after me for the rest of my life. Because what happened to me would discourage anyone from signing up as an agent.’

From the age of 16, Gilmour served the state as an informer, first inside the Derry Brigade of the Irish National Liberation Army and later the Provisional IRA in the same city. In 1983 he gave evidence against dozens of alleged Derry IRA members as a supergrass, although the courts later dismissed his testimony as unreliable.

The RUC Special Branch officer who recruited him, Alan Barker, wrote in his memoir Shadows that Gilmour was arguably the most important informer the security forces ran inside the IRA within Derry.

Living under a false identity for 25 years and cut off permanently from his large family back in Derry, Gilmour contacted The Observer because ‘I feel an enormous sense of betrayal by some of those I worked for’.

He said: ‘The people I have dealt with over the last few years I assume are from MI5, and they basically don’t give a shit about me. A couple of years ago they stopped paying for a psychiatrist whom I had been seeing for nine years, a counsellor that helped me deal with the flashbacks and the post-traumatic stress I have had to suffer.

‘I feel as if I’ve been discarded. As well as the mental anguish, I have a serious heart condition and underwent major heart surgery a few years ago. I live on £177 per fortnight and I am only 47.

‘Even my old RUC contacts have stopped returning calls. It’s as if I have been blackballed. You risk your life to stop others getting murdered and maimed, but in the end you are forgotten about. You are an embarrassment from the past; you are no longer useful.

‘I always thought that, once my career as an agent was over, I would be looked after for the rest of my life. I was an agent of the state, but the state doesn’t want to know. That is a dangerous thing for the recruitment of future agents. Anyone thinking of infiltrating or working on the inside to bring down terrorist organisations should get it nailed down, on paper, legally binding, that they will receive a pension long after they have retired from this deadly game.’

Like many of the Irish republican informers who worked for Britain, Gilmour has suffered from depression, ill-health and alcoholism.

‘You have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life. There are times when I have been on holiday abroad where I have panicked, sensing that I saw old IRA men I worked with. It never goes away and no matter what people in Sinn Féin say, about informers being safe to go home, that is a lot of rubbish.

‘Having said all that, I have absolutely no regrets about undermining the INLA and the IRA in Derry. They were murderers and they had to be stopped. There are dozens upon dozens of people in Northern Ireland today who are alive because of what I and other agents did. That was why it was worth all the hassle and the danger - lives were saved, they were stopped.’

However, the former supergrass said he was prepared to ‘fade away’ if the security services help him out.

‘I am not asking for a house, all I want is a pension. But when I first started spying on the INLA, and later the IRA, I honestly believed that one day the Queen would give me a medal.’

Irish Times
17 February 2008

Many articles posted on Brendan Hughes might be identical or nearly so, but I will include the major sources so in the future it can be seen who published what.

A former IRA hunger striker who fell out with Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams over the peace process has died.

Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes, once one of Belfast’s most feared IRA gunmen, died after a short illness aged 59.

A member of the IRA from the start of the Troubles in 1969 he was involved in a number attacks on the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary and also robberies.

Brendan Hughes photographed in Long Kesh prison

He joined the Provisional IRA when it broke away in 1970 from the Official IRA.

In 1973, he was arrested along with Gerry Adams and Tom Cahill after the British Army raided a house on the Falls Road. They were detained in Long Kesh, which would later become the Maze Prison.

Six months later he escaped in a rolled-up mattress in a refuse lorry and fled over the Border.

In the Republic, Hughes assumed a new identity, Arthur McAllister, and returned to Belfast pretending to be a toy salesman. He lived in a house in the affluent Malone area of the city and for five months believed to have been the Provisionals’ Belfast brigade commander.

After five months, however, his new identity was rumbled and the Army raided the house in Myrtlefield Park.

In 1977, Hughes was transferred to the H-Blocks where he became the Officer Commanding of the IRA prisoners in the Maze. Republican inmates were engaged in a protracted battle of wills with the jail authorities and British government, insisting they were prisoners of war refusing to wear uniforms and staging a blanket protest.

After fellow prisoners rejected a suggestion from Hughes that they should wear the uniforms and subvert the system from within, he ordered in 1978 an escalation of their campaign with a no wash protest.

Known as the dirty protest, the prisoners refused to leave their cells to go to the toilet and later refused to empty the chamber pots they were provided with. They eventually ended up smearing their own excrement on the walls of their cells on Hughes’ orders.

Two years later, the dispute escalated again when the prisoners decided to go on hunger strike. Hughes and six other prisoners - Raymond McCartney, Leo Green , Tom McFeeley, Sean McKenna, Tommy McKearney and Irish National Liberation Army inmate John Nixon - started to fast.

Two weeks later in Armagh women’s jail, three prisoners joined the hunger strike.

The hunger strike lasted 53 days after republicans believed they had struck a deal with the authorities.

Hughes called the hunger strike off as Sean McKenna was on the verge of death.

Bobby Sands, who had been a close aide of Hughes, took over as Officer Commanding in the Maze Prison. When republican disillusionment with the prison authorities intensified, Sands, who would become the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, ordered a second hunger strike in 1981 in which he and nine other prisoners died.

In 1986 Hughes was released from prison and became active again in republicanism.

However in the years after the 1994 and 1997 IRA ceasefires and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, he became increasingly disillusioned with the direction of Sinn Féin. In interviews he dismissed Mr Adams and the leadership as ‘the Armani suit brigade’ and accused them of betraying core republican principles and their working class roots.

Mr Adams paid tribute to Hughes, despite the reported rift. “Brendan was a very good friend and comrade over many years of struggle,” he said. Mr Adams insisted that, although Hughes disagreed with the direction he had taken in recent years, he still held him in high esteem.

“Brendan will be missed, not least by his family, but also by the wider republican family with whom he dedicated such a large part of his life in furtherance of Irish republican goals,” he said. “He was my friend.”

Derry Journal
15 February 2008

The dissident republican splinter group blamed for the murder of Strabane man Andrew Burns is riddled with informers, it’s been claimed.

The 27 year-old painter and decorator from Drum Road, Strabane was shot twice in the torso outside St. Columba’s Church, Donnyloop in Co. Donegal on Monday evening.

An INLA source told the ‘Journal’ last night that the deceased was one of several members of the micro paramilitary group, Oglaigh Na hEireann, which has been blamed for the killing. The source claimed that the “20-strong at most” group was in turmoil.

“Our people were told by people in Oglaigh Na hEireann that they were investigating a number of their own members for being British agents. His name was later mentioned to one of our people as one of those being investigated.”

The small grouping of Oglaigh Na hEireann, which was set up a few years ago by former members of the breakaway Continuity IRA and Real IRA (with which Mr. Burns was formerly associated), has been blamed for the murder.

The group claimed responsibility for two pipe bomb attacks in the Strabane area last year.

The Real IRA, the INLA and the recently formed Republican Defence Association this week denied any involvement in the killing.

Around 18 months ago the deceased was shot in the knees and upper thigh in what was understood to be Real IRA punishment shooting in Head of the Town area of Strabane. He later broke ties with the organisation and formed links with the breakaway group.

BBC

A memorial service to mark the 30th anniversary of an IRA bombing has taken place.

Twelve people were killed and many more badly burned in the La Mon House Hotel attack on 17 February 1978.

The bomb turned the small country hotel, east of Belfast, into an inferno. The commemoration took place at Castlereagh Borough Council.

However, some victims’ relatives asked First Minister Ian Paisley to stay away from the event.

Last month, Lilly McDowell, who was injured in the 1978 attack, said DUP leader Mr Paisley had let victims down by sitting in government with Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness.

The DUP’s Jeffery Donaldson said the party respected the victim’s feelings.

All those who died in the bombing were attending the annual dinner dance of the Irish Collie Club. Three of them were married couples and seven were women.

They were all Protestants and included a reservist in the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Other senior members of the DUP, which has a majority on the council, were expected to attend.

Please check out the list of archived material THE BLANKET has posted.

Brendan Hughes - Archive Material

G21 - IRISH EYES

Brendan Hughes was one of a small group of Republicans in the Lower Falls (Belfast) who split from the IRA in 1970 to form what was later to be known as the Provisional IRA. In the sometimes violent split within the movement at that time one of the first victims was his cousin, Charlie Hughes, who was shot dead in a gun battle in the Lower Falls by members of the Official IRA.

After almost three years on the run, Hughes was arrested, along with Gerry Adams. They were tortured for over 12 hours in Springfield Road barracks and then Castlereagh before being flown to the cages of Long Kesh. Within 5 months Hughes had escaped from Long Kesh, crossed the border, and within 10 days was back in Belfast with a new identity, to assume command of the Belfast Brigade.

Captured again, 6 months later, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison on weapons, explosives and documents charges. Hughes, as Brigade O/C (Officer Commanding) was caught with what the press called a “Doomsday Plan” which was the IRA plan for the defense of the Nationalist community in Belfast.

While O/C of Republican prisoners in Long Kesh, Hughes was charged in connection with a prison riot and given an additional 5 years. However, at this time, the process of Ulsterization and criminalization had begun and he was taken from court to the infamous H-Blocks.

“That morning” said Hughes, “I left Long Kesh, Brendan Hughes, O/C Republican prisoners, recognized as a political prisoner and that afternoon, I was Hughes, 704, in the H-Blocks.”

In the H-Blocks Brendan Hughes was instrumental in organizing the men on the blanket protest and was elected O/C with Bobby Sands as his adjutant. As the protests by the men escalated, without any movement by prison authorities or the Thatcher government to resolve the prisoners demands to end their inhumane treatment, he called for volunteers to join him in a hunger strike.

Hughes resigned as O/C, to be replaced by Bobby Sands and was joined by 6 of the 90 men who had volunteered to go on hunger strike. After 53 days without food, with Sean McKenna within hours of death and the others in very serious condition, the strike was called off as the government delivered a document which satisfied the prisoners demands.

After the government reneged on their agreement the strike led this time by Bobby Sands commenced with deadly consequences.

In our interview Hughes discussed a wide range of topics on the Irish political landscape.

G21: Share with us your opinions on the Good Friday Agreement.

HUGHES: The decision was taken from the top down, there were no discussions, there was nothing taking place.

What we heard was, ‘The Hume/Adams Document’ and I am very annoyed at this because, I have spent my whole life in this Republican movement and all of a sudden everyone is talking about ‘The Hume Adams Document’ and I asked if I could see it. To my knowledge no one has ever seen it.

I thought it was a disgrace that John Hume knew where this movement was going [and] I didn’t know where it was going. I didn’t know anything about ‘The Hume Adams Document’, what the hell is it? Then, ‘The Hume Adams Document’, developed into the ‘Good Friday Agreement’.

What was the Good Friday Agreement all about? All of my life I spent attempting to bring down Stormont, attempting to remove the British from Ireland and all of a sudden, all of that language was gone. We no longer talk about a British declaration of intent to withdraw from this country and we have got to the stage where we were actually fighting to get down to the Stormont, that we just spent 30 years trying to bring down. The loyalty factor eventually burnt out with me, the loyalty factor was no longer there.

G21: So what is your opinion of the Sinn Féin leadership?

HUGHES: Stormont is OK as long as we’re in it. What was developing here was a sort of a class thing within the Republican movement. You had the “Armani Suit Brigade” and a lot of these people I had never come across before. I had never spent time in prison with them and their politics drifted away from me — their politics — I didn’t drift away from my politics, their politics drifted away from me to a stage where I believed I needed to say something, because these people are running away with my movement.

The suffering and everything that we represented was no longer there anymore and these people had it, they were wining and dining at Stormont.

I believe very shortly, we will be wining and dining in Westminster. I believe that they have run away with the politics, the real politics of the Republican movement, the Republican struggle, and I believe that they have to be resisted. Which I am doing.

It wasn’t easy for me to go public and criticize all these things that were going on, but I feel a moral responsibility to do so. Even though it puts me on the fringe and I am called a dissident and other names. But I know damn well, that what I am saying, is representative of the ordinary people on the ground. The Republican Movement

I believe this Republican movement belongs to the people. I don’t believe that people like me should walk away and form another small group to oppose this group. This group is the Republican movement. We have fought, we have gone through an awful lot of struggle and I believe it has been hijacked by a handful of people who have gone in a particular direction that I disagree with.

But it is my movement. I don’t want to form another movement, I want my movement back to what we fought for.

I don’t believe that it is totally hopeless. I believe it can be won back. If I thought it was hopeless, I would probably leave the country. I believe that I have a moral responsibility and a duty to carry on the struggle. It’s not easy, a lot of the people I am talking about are comrades and friends of mine. I wish they could change and turn this thing around and bring it back to the people. Bring the movement back to the people. Not a political party that’s running to Stormont, running to Westminster with their Armani suits on and jutting about in their State cars. The same regime that’s been oppressing us for so many years, they have become a part of.

G21: So what’s your position on decommissioning?

HUGHES: The IRA has been asked to decommission. We were all told that there would be no decommissioning. When you bring a stranger to a dump, an IRA dump, and point out where that dump is, to me that is decommissioning.

I certainly would not go near that dump again, so that dump is, by and large, decommissioned. Forget about it. It has been identified.

Yet I am told there will be no decommissioning.

To me that is decommissioning.

People are telling lies. We are doing everything we were told would not happen. We still hear at some commemorations people getting up on platforms and telling blatant lies. ‘The war is not over’. By and large, the war is over. The current joke in the town at the moment is:

Q. ‘What is the difference between a Sticky (Official IRA) and a Provie (Provisional IRA).

A. Twenty years.’

The only difference is that the Stickies didn’t have to decommission.

G21: The controversy about the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) still rages. What are your thoughts?

HUGHES: What I was beginning to see was the reintroduction of a different type of philosophy. The words they were using ‘the RUC has to be changed’ no longer ‘disbanded.’

G21: Your feelings on commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Hunger Strike?

HUGHES: Anyone who is going out to commemorate the Republican struggle should commemorate the people who died in the struggle. It should be about respect and to commemorate the sacrifice that these people made. I believe the party of the working class is entitled to commemorate the working-class people who died.

I believe a party of the Middle or Upper-class should not be allowed to capitalize on those people’s deaths. Those people died for working-class issues and I believe that the only people who should be allowed to capitalize on that are working-class people who are fighting for working-class issues. I don’t believe the leadership of the Republican movement, at present, is fighting for working-class issues or fighting for the issues that these people died for.

G21: So it sounds like you might be accused of advocating armed struggle.

HUGHES: We are sitting in Divis Towers now and there is £10 million of equipment on top of this roof, there are armed British troops on top of this roof.

As long as there is one British soldier on this roof, I believe that people have a right to oppose that. Unfortunately, the occupation forces are still here and unfortunately, the leadership of the movement that I belonged to have become a part of that, they have become a part of the problem.”

Sunday, 17 February 2008
Organized Rage
Posted by Mick Hall

When one receives a telephone call late at night, I always find myself picking up the receiver apprehensively, for fear of it being bad news and so it was when I answered my telephone last night. A friend from Ireland was on the line calling to let me know that Brendan Hughes had just died, not much was said between us as Brendan’s death was to recent to reminisce about the man, we kept to facts, where, why and when and then we both put the phone down and were left with our own thoughts.

For most Irish Republicans under sixty years of age Brendan Hughes was a towering figure, by this I do not mean he was worshiped or considered infallible, far from it, for it was his human frailties that partially made him the man he was. It was his total integrity and incorruptibility which set him above many of the current leaders of the mainstream Irish Republican Movement and indeed the profession of politics as a whole. In many ways he was an Irish version of the Palestinian revolutionary George Habash. Neither men were interested in personal wealth and lived their wholes lives on a low income, both ending their days living in a small flat, George in Amman and Brendan in Belfast, thus whilst sad it was fitting that these two revolutionaries should die within weeks of each other.

Brendan Hughes was the opposite of today’s leading SF Republicans; honest, whilst they can behave in a dishonest way, politically consistent, whilst they have become inconsistent, principled, whilst they are shifty, dignified, whilst they act in a clownish manner, [Martin McGuinness visit to USA] modest, whilst they can be arrogant and autocratic, tolerant of dissent, whilst they practice the exact opposite. *

Having been the commander of the Belfast Brigade of the PIRA during the 1970s, O/C (Officer Commanding] of the PIRA in the Maize prison, participated in a Hunger Strike for 53 days and later the Blanket Protest, returned to the PRM after leaving jail in the 1980s, Brendan Hughes finally broke with the PRM over the Good Friday Agreement; [GFA] and whilst he refused to join any other republican organization he was withering in his criticism of his former close comrade Gerry Adams when he accepted in its entirety the GFA. Whilst I will be posting a full obituary of Brendan Hughes in the coming week, I will finish with the words of the man himself.

“I am not advocating dumb militarism or a return to war. Never in the history of republicanism was so much sacrificed and so little gained; too many left dead and too few achievements. Let us think most strongly before going down that road again. I am simply questioning the wisdom of administering British rule in this part of Ireland. I am asking what happened to the struggle in all Ireland—what happened to the idea of a thirty-two county socialist republic. That, after all, is what it was all about. Not about participating in a northern administration that closes hospitals and attacks the teachers’ unions. I am asking why we are not fighting for and defending the rights of ordinary working people, for better wages and working conditions. Does thirty years of struggle boil down to a big room at Stormont, ministerial cars, dark suits and the implementation of the British Patten Report?”

Brendan Hughes, 1949-2008.*

BBC

The former hunger striker and IRA commander Brendan Hughes has died in hospital.

The 59-year-old Belfast man was taken into hospital last week after becoming critically ill. His family said he passed away on Saturday night.

He was the “officer commanding” IRA prisoners in the Maze jail and ordered a dirty protest and later led the first republican hunger strike in 1980.

Brendan Hughes

In recent years he became critical of Sinn Fein and the route it was taking.

Brendan Hughes joined the IRA in 1969, he was arrested in the early 1970s along with Gerry Adams and Tom Cahill and sent to Long Kesh, which later became the Maze prison.

He escaped shortly afterwards in a rolled up mattress but was eventually re-arresseted.

Known as The Dark, Mr Hughes later recalled in journalist Peter Taylor’s BBC series Provos how he gave himself up when the security forces arrived to arrest him while he was on the run in Belfast.

“They came to the door and they knew right away who I was,” he explained.

“I was protesting about the fact that they were raiding the house when the Special Branch man turned round to me and says: ‘Oh come on, Brendan you’ve had a good enough run’.

“I knew that was it. They were quite friendly this time. I was put in the back of the jeep and taken to Castlereagh. I wasn’t punched and I wasn’t insulted.”

In 1977 he was transferred to the H-Blocks where he became the IRA OC and led the hunger strike.

“Brendan will be missed, not least by his family, but also by the wider republican family with whom he dedicated such a large part of his life in furtherance of Irish republican goals”.
Gerry Adams
Sinn Fein president

It lasted 53 days after republicans believed they had struck a deal with the authorities on the issue of prisoner’s uniforms.

Mr Hughes called the hunger strike off as Sean McKenna was on the verge of death.

Bobby Sands, who had been a close aide of Hughes, took over as “officer commanding” in the Maze Prison. He ordered the second hunger strike in 1981 in which he and nine other inmates died.

Brendan Hughes never fully recovered from his hunger strike ordeal and two years ago underwent an operation to save his sight.

In interviews he later dismissed Mr Adams and the leadership as “the Armani suit brigade” and accused them of betraying core republican principles and their working class roots.

In a statement issued on Saturday the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said he held Mr Hughes “in high esteem” and had been “a very good friend and comrade over many years of struggle”.

“Brendan will be missed, not least by his family, but also by the wider republican family with whom he dedicated such a large part of his life in furtherance of Irish republican goals,” he said.

Sunday Life
Sunday 17, February 2008
By Stephen Breen

The renegade republican who was blasted to death last week once accused cops of trying to recruit him as an informer.

Andrew Burns from Strabane, who was murdered in the grounds of Donnyloop Parish Church in Co Donegal last Tuesday, went public in 2006 to claim Special Branch had spent months in an effort to recruit him as an agent.

Although the 27-year-old’s former comrades in the RIRA initially accepted his denials, he came under suspicion after the security forces scored a number of successes against dissidents in Strabane.

Burns, who was once shot in a so-called ‘punishment’ attack, later left the RIRA to join the small breakaway faction, Oghlaigh na hEireann.

It was initially believed Burns was killed because dissident chiefs suspected he had supplied information to the security forces.

But another source claimed he was targeted because he was suspected of working with criminal gangs linked to loyalists.

Said the source: “Everyone is saying that Burns was executed because he was an informer but there’s more to it than that. If he was an informer it would have sanctioned his death warrant, but he was coming under suspicion for a whole range of other things.

“The word was that he was keeping money from robberies for himself but he was also running about with criminal gangs who dealt with loyalists.

” He had been around the dissidents for quite some time and there’s a few other boys who are running scared because they now know what this group is capable of.

“They appear to have access to a fair amount of weapons and they are quite ruthless and dangerous.”

Tensions are running high in the area and fears are growing that more suspected informers could be targeted.

Burns was taken from the vicinity of his Upper Main Street flat in Strabane by an armed gang.

It’s understood he was interrogated for an hour before he was shot dead.

Although he managed to wave down a passing car, he later lost his fight for life.

BBC

A medal awarded to a rebel officer for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin is on its way back to Ireland

Heavy fighting took place in central Dublin in 1916

The uprising medal was awarded to William Patrick Partridge - a captain in the Irish Citizen Army - for his part in the battle.

The medal was auctioned in Plymouth for £12,000 after being offered for sale by one of his descendents, who lives in South Gloucestershire.

The auction house said that it had been bought by a collector in Ireland.

His grandson Sid McAuley, 58, said the medal was a “significant” piece of Irish history.

“I am and will continue to be, very proud of my grandfather and everything he did. He was a straightforward man who fought for people’s rights,” he said.

William Patrick Partridge fought in Dublin during the rising

“He was very proud and very brave. He had more respect than most politicians.”

He fought alongside Countess Markievicz and the Irish Volunteers at the College of Surgeons during the rising.

The 1916 Easter Rising saw Irish rebels attempt to seize the Irish capital from British forces.

British troops put down the rebellion and many of its ringleaders were captured and executed.

Mr Partridge was also captured and sentenced to 15 years for taking part in the rebellion and jailed in Dartmoor Prison.

He was released due to illness and died of Bright’s Disease in 1917 aged just 43.

By Alana Fearon
Irelandclick
16 Feb 2008

Yet another error by the top-cop team set up to investigate killings of the 30-year Troubles in the north has been branded “completely unforgivable” by the family of one of the Ballymurphy Massacre victims.

Date wrong

After getting the date of John Laverty’s death wrong in a letter to his devastated family, the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) this week “added insult to injury” with an “unforgivable” error in the number of people massacred in Ballymurphy in a three-day British Army killing spree in August 1971.

Apology

In what was meant to be an apology to the Laverty family, a letter signed by the HET’s senior resolution manager said John’s killing review was one of 24 deaths which occurred in Ballymurphy over the three-day period during internment.
In fact there were 11 deaths in Ballymurphy between the 9 and 11 August, and 27 across the north in total.
Andree Murphy from Relatives for Justice, who has been working closely with the Laverty family, slammed the HET for playing “fast and easy with the facts”.

Family orientated

“These officials constantly talk about being family orientated when this is yet more proof they can’t work with facts, they play fast and easy with details and they do not have the family’s best interests at heart,” she fumed.
“It is abundantly clear they are simply not looking at cases properly when time and time again these irresponsible, unforgivable errors are creeping in.
“The family will not be accepting this as a mistake.”

Error

Only last week the North Belfast News revealed that, after almost two years of investigations, the HET had made what they described as a “typographical” error in a letter to the Laverty clan.
Family members said they were too disgusted to seek an explanation from the HET who got the month of John’s killing wrong.
And they said they wanted nothing more to do with the investigation.

Made matters worse

“After the first mistake the Lavertys said they wanted nothing to do with the HET and this latest error has just made matters worse,” said Andree.
“They should have just left them alone like they requested but now, if it’s possible, they have left the family even more devastated.
“There is nothing effective about the team and they will never gain people’s confidence with errors like this.”

No response

Despite several attempts to contact a HET spokeswoman, there was no response before the North Belfast News went to print.

Aine McEntee
Irelandclick
16/02/2008

Cops tell residents to check their homes for an explosive device almost 12 hours after PSNI received bomb warning

Police officers in North Belfast have been slammed for playing fast and loose with residents’ lives after telling people in Brompton Park to check their gardens and under their cars for a bomb.
Homes in Brompton Park were paid a visit by police officers last Saturday, who revealed they had received a bomb warning the PREVIOUS night.
One woman, who lives in the street and didn’t want to be named, said when the police officer told her to check her own property for a bomb, she was dumbfounded.
“He said to me, ‘is that your car, and your wee recycling box?’
“I said yes and he said, ‘well you may go check it’. I said to him you’re having a laugh but he just walked away.
“I got down on my knees then and checked under the car and inside the kerbie box and all around the house.
“Once I sat down I realised what I had done. I’ve children here in the house. We could’ve all been dead.”
Sinn Féin councillor Conor Maskey who sits on the North Belfast District Policing Partnership said he would be raising the matter at the group’s meeting next Monday night.
“When an incident like this occurs the police are duty-bound to have every residents safety as their primary concern,” Conor Maskey said.
“It’s just not good enough to ask anyone to inspect their property for a potential explosive device. The police should be doing that for them.”
The councillor also condemned the actions of those delivering dozens of death and bomb threats to republicans right across Belfast.
“This incident shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and it’s been clearly demonstrated that those behind these threats have no community support whatsoever,” he said.
A spokesperson for the PSNI revealed they delayed in notifying residents as a decision had been taken not to take the threat seriously.
“Police received an anonymous call late on Friday night of a threatening nature in the general area of Brompton Park.
“Due to the number of hoax threat calls over the last few months a decision was taken to carry out a thorough search in daylight.
“Police carried out a thorough search in daylight.
“Nothing was found.
“Residents were urged to be vigilant and advised if they came across anything suspicious they should not touch it but contact their local police station immediately.”