Special Branch link to Loyalist death squads
EXCLUSIVE: RUC failed to warn victims, says inquiry investigator
A FORMER senior police officer has told an Ulster terror inquiry that Special Branch systematically failed to warn some 255 people in Northern Ireland that they were being targeted by Loyalist death squads. Vincent McFadden, senior investigating officer with the Stevens inquiry, which investigated allegations of security force and Loyalist collusion in Northern Ireland, said the majority of those targeted were members of the Catholic community.
McFadden said some of the targets had links to Republican paramilitary groups such as the IRA, but in other cases the links were “perceived”. He told the inquiry the targeting was often a case of “guilty by association” simply because a person had been spotted in the company of a known paramilitary.
The former detective chief superintendent said the Stevens inquiry found no evidence any of the individuals were ever warned by the RUC that their lives were under threat, and an unspecified number of them were later shot and killed or shot and injured. McFadden said he had records that showed RUC Special Branch failed to act on intelligence they had received that Catholic civilians were being targetted.
He went on to say senior Special Branch officers told his investigators that records on a number of the individuals under threat never existed or had been destroyed. However, the records were subsequently recovered some years later.
McFadden said other security agencies, including British military intelligence, “sanitised” information on Loyalist targeting, making it difficult to take action. In some instances the military knew Special Branch was not acting on intelligence received but did nothing to alter that fact.
The retired policeman said there were instances where spies inside Loyalist terror groups such as the UVF, LVF and UDA told their security force handlers about specific threats to individuals but no action was taken. When asked if Special Branch behaved with equal disregard involving the right to life of individuals from both sections of the community, McFadden said “yes”.
The inquiry, which is focused on the murder of Protestant terror chief Billy Wright, who was shot dead inside The Maze prison in 1997, was told all Northern Ireland’s major Loyalist and Republican paramilitary groups were heavily infiltrated by RUC Special Branch and the British Army’s shadowy Force Research Unit (FRU) during the 1990s. The family of a County Armagh man shot dead as an informer by an infamous IRA internal security unit led by a paid British agent said McFadden’s evidence endorsed their belief that the security services allowed their son to be killed.
Father-of-two John Dignam was shot dead along with fellow double-agents Gregory Burns and Aiden Starrs in June 1992. The three men were abducted in the Irish Republic, interrogated, tortured and murdered by the Provo’s notorious “nutting squad”, as first revealed in the Sunday Herald.
Pat and Irene Dignam believe their son was deliberately sacrificed by the intelligence services in order to protect the identity of former Belfast Provo, Freddie Scappaticci – aka agent Stakeknife – the British Army’s highest ranking mole inside the IRA and also a leading figure in the Provo’s internal security unit. Stakeknife was also exposed by the Sunday Herald.
The Portadown couple claim the truth about their son’s murder has been deliberately suppressed for 17 years. “We are the victims of a state-sponsored murder”, said Irene Dignam. “Vincent McFadden’s evidence compounds our belief the intelligence agencies knew John was under threat in June 1992. Their deliberate failure to act cost our son his life.”
The Sunday Herald has investigated the activities of Special Branch and FRU since 2000, when we revealed the full extent of collusion between intelligence services and Loyalist paramilitaries in the murders of Catholics.
[dm]93[/dm]
